The Jew and Christianity [microform] ; some phases, ancient and modern, of the Jewish attitude towards Christianity

THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

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Jewish Amtude towards

Christianity

BY

HERBERT DANBY, D.D.

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RESIDENTIARY CANON
OF ST. GEORGE'S CATHEDRAL, JERUSALEM

LONDON
THE SHELDON PRESS

NEW YORK AND TORONTO : THE MACMILLAN CO.

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First published

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INTRODUCTORY

ON the general subject, the treatment of Jesus and
Christianity in Jewish literature from the close of the
Talmud period (end of sixth century) to the present
day, there is still no systematic survey. The subject
is not an attractive one. The field is very wide, the
literature is not very accessible and it is in the highest
degree wearisome. The bulk of it is controversial;
and nothing is more wearisome than controversial
literature once we have passed beyond the atmo-
sphere and spirit of the time, lost touch with the
current idiom and changed our ideas as to the
relative importance of the various issues at stake,
and, above all, when we are totally out of sympathy
with the lines of argumentation and are unable t6
accept the greater part of the premises of the
disputants.

It is not proposed to touch in these lectures upon
the mass of Jewish-Christian controversial literature ;
they are confined in the main to the Jewish attitude
to our Lord as it appears in certain Jewish expres-
sions of opinion which were meant only for Jewish
ears and were not primarily intended (like so much
of present-day Jewish opinion) to be overheard by
Christians, and to a few Jewish writings on the

vi INTRODUCTORY

subject which are not, avowedly, controversial.
Even in this selection it is not possible to be exhaus-
tive : all that is here proposed is to take what may
fairly be regarded as representative statements at
various stages in the history of Christian- Jewish
relations and, as far as possible, sketch the general
conditions out of which those expressions of opinion
arose.

The Lectures are printed in the form in which they were
first delivered, and a few lapses into colloquial style have
been allowed to pass uncorrected.

CONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTORY ... V

I. DURING THE FIRST CHRISTIAN CENTURY . . I
II. THE TALMUDIC ERA AND EARLY MEDIEVAL

TIMES ...- l8

III. FROM THE CRUSADES TO THE EIGHTEENTH

CENTURY .... 39

IV. IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY ... 62
V. AT THE PRESENT TIME "

NOTES ...'

INDEX .... IT 9

Vll

CHAPMAN LECTURES

THE chapters of this book were delivered as
Lectures at Sion College, London, during October,
1926. They were arranged by the S.P.Q.K.,
on the initiative and with the help of Mr. Conrad
Chapman and American friends.

THE JEW
AND CHRISTIANITY

DURING THE FIRST CHRISTIAN CENTURY

THERE is an outstanding fact, probably un-
paralleled, which is distinctive of the story of the
Christian Church. Side by side with the Christian
Church God has allowed another, the Jewish Church,
to persist. These two are, so to speak, two trees
arising from the same stock. The one owes its
existence to its acceptance of Jesus as Christ; the
other, it can certainly be said, owes its continued
existence to its rejection of Jesus as Christ. There
they are : they have from the first existed side by
side (for modern Judaism is just as much an immedi-
ate product of the first century as is Christianity) ;
they have stood, nineteen hundred years, spectators
of each other's lives, critics of each other's beliefs;
for the most part sharing, stage by stage, the same
civilization, living in more or less close proximity
within the same countries ; and knowing (or believing
themselves to know) the most, including the best
and the worst, of each other.

Thus, throughout its history, Christianity has been

2 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

provided with a gauge, a criterion, a measuring rod:
Judaism, through the long expanses of history, has
placed itself alongside of Christianity ; it has applied
itself as a measuring rod; it, alone of the contem-
porary civilizations and religions, has consistently
hovered around the flanks of Christian civilization,
a perpetual witness, itself changing scarcely at all,
while recording, stage after stage, its impressions of
Christianity.

In the absolute sense (or, if you prefer it, from the
Christian point of view) Judaism as a measuring
line is distorted and distorting : as St. Paul puts it,
" a blindness in part is come upon Israel " ; but in
the relative sense Judaism alone, through its peculiar
circumstances, offers us a systematic, consistent,
independent, external criterion of the various forms
of Christianity at various stages of its history.
What we propose to study now is Christianity (or,
rather, Christians) at various stages in history, from
New Testament tunes to the present day, as measured
by this largely consistent gauge.

From the time when Jesus stood before the Jewish
High Priest, and throughout nineteen centuries,
Christianity has come up for judgment before
representative Judaism ; it has been testified against
by countless successions of witnesses; it has been
charged with many and various crimes ; it has been
the victim often of false testimony.

But, if one may be allowed to give the moral of
the story before the story itself, it is this : relatively,
the judgment of Judaism is just ; the Jewish attitude
to Christianity, veering as it does from the one

THE FIRST CHRISTIAN CENTURY 3

extreme point of utter loathing and detestation,
through phases of more or less cold neutrality and
defensive hostility, to a phase approaching appreci-
ation of certain Christians and of reverence for Jesus
their Master this Jewish attitude has varied with
almost mathematical certainty according to the
precise degree in which Christians have shown
themselves real followers, in spirit and deed, of their
Saviour.

The more Christians have conformed to the spirit
of Christ, the more has Jewish respect been drawn
to Christianity and to Christ. The farther Christians
have drawn back from following after Jesus in spirit
and in truth, so have Christians brought into dis-
credit Christianity and Christ Himself.

It is the veriest truism : those outside the Christian
fold judge Christianity and our Lord Himself, not
primarily from the Gospel records, not primarily
from the official teaching of the Church; but, first
and foremost, from the living witness of Christians
average professing Christians. The more worthy,
Christians prove themselves to be, the more worthy
a conception will the stranger form of Christ.
Conversely, the more unworthy the conception which
the stranger forms of Christ and His teaching, the
more unworthy must be the so-called followers of
Christ. The Christian is supposed to be what, in
fact, he ought to be (or ought to try to be) a mirror
of Christ.

So we may be able to find some salutary discipline
in searching out what have been in the past, and
especially what are to-day, the various forms of

4 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

Jewish attitude and opinion with regard to Christ,
Christians and Christianity. The Jew has ever been
on the watch ; his vision may have been distorted,
but, with allowance made for its inevitable margin
of error, it has been consistent.

The results of this search are, on the whole, far
from flattering to us Christians. They are the more
humiliating when we think of what is most probably
their real basis our own failure to show forth Christ
to the world in our own lives : because we, Christ's
soldiers and servants, have so far forgotten our
professions and betrayed our trust as to put our
Lord and Master to an open shame.

In the New Testament period it might be supposed
that relations between Jews and Christians were
clearly denned. We might sum up the position
briefly as follows :

Our Lord taught certain things and He made
certain claims. He taught fundamental principles
of morality which were sometimes in direct opposition
to those of the ordinary accredited Jewish teachers ;
and He claimed that in His person all the Jewish
longings for a Messiah who should save the Jewish
race, soul and body, as a state and as individuals
that all these longings were fulfilled and satisfied in
His person. After our Lord's crucifixion this teach-
ing and these claims were promulgated, with more
and more success, first to a limited extent among
the Jews and isolated Gentiles in Palestine, and then
to a much more marked extent among both Jews and
Gentiles in certain other parts of the Roman Empire.

THE FIRST CHRISTIAN CENTURY 5

As regards the Jews we must beware of making a
false simplification that some Jews accepted Jesus'
claims and teaching, while others rejected them;
and that the Jewish followers of Jesus gave up their
Jewish allegiance and ceased to be Jews, while the
others, by their refusal to accept Jesus, by this very
act of refusal, proclaimed their Jewishness. The
course of things was hardly so uncomplicated as
this.

For our particular purpose we shall do best to
draw our information not from the Gospels (which
give the crystallized Christian presentation of facts
and controversies), but from two other sources : the
letters of St. Paul, and the surviving scraps of Jewish
opinion preserved in the earliest elements of the
Talmud.

The Epistles of St. Paul are the earliest Christian
documents which we possess. What is the picture
we there find of Jewish and Christian relations?
We cannot afford time for details, but the outline
is this :

St. Paul preached the Gospel of Jesus to the Jews
outside Palestine, and especially to the non-Jews.
He was soon faced with the problem whether, to
become a member of this young body of believers,
it was necessary for the Gentile to become a Jew
that is, whether Christianity was an essentially
Jewish creed, with all its roots and all its hopes
bound up with Judaism. As we all know, he decided
to the contrary : the sole condition was to be belief
in Jesus as Lord and Christ : "In Him is neither
Jew nor Greek, circumcision nor uncircumcision."

6 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

Only after much trouble, and after grave heart-
searchings among the other and older Christians,
was St. Paul able to press this view upon his brother
apostles in Palestine Jewish Christians who had
so far envisaged the faith in Jesus solely within a
Jewish framework.

The fact which we find difficult to realize, but
which nevertheless is a fact, is that Christianity lived
several decades in Jewish surroundings and as a
Jewish belief ; and, consequently, in many or most
respects, did not transcend the limits of Judaism.
So long as the early Christians in Palestine conformed
with the many external requirements of the Jewish
religion (circumcision, attendance at the Temple
during the three great festivals, observed the laws
as to forbidden foods, and so forth) so long as they
conformed with these, the external laws and practices
of Judaism, they seem to have been strangely free
to hold their beliefs in Jesus ; at least none dreamed
of regarding them as men who had forfeited or
thrown off their Jewishness.

But then came the controversy : does Christi-
anity involve the acceptance of the Law of Moses as
denned and elaborated by Jewish custom, by the
so-called " tradition of the elders " ? It was a long
and bitter controversy. But the increasing number
of Gentile adherents put the matter beyond doubt :
the Jewish law was a burden on the Gentiles " too
grievous to be borne."

We may turn now to the purely Jewish point of view.

Sects within Judaism were no new thing. In
themselves such sects were only expressions of

THE FIRST CHRISTIAN CENTURY 7

particular ideals. Thus, in the time of our Lord,
four main parties were very much in evidence.

There were the Sadducees, the aristocracy of the
time, members of the priestly families, the holders
of such official posts as the Roman overlords allowed
to be held by members of the conquered Jewish
people. In religious matters the Sadducees were
the conservatives of the time, hating change and
religious innovations. 1

Another sect, familiar to us from the Gospels,
was that of the Pharisees. The Gospels give us only
one aspect of these people. Jewish sources show us
that the Pharisees were, so to speak, the modernists
of the time, who brought the Law of Moses "up to
date," by steadily accumulating traditions explana-
tory of the Law of Moses, and by adapting the Law
of Moses to present-day requirements. In another
way, important for our purpose, they were nation-
alists, in so far as they saw in their traditions an
exclusively national possession : to their mind the
Jewish national identity depended on the preserv-
ation and practice of the Mosaic law with its tra-
ditional interpretations and accumulations. Again,
as opposed to the Sadducees, who naturally as
office-holders sought at all costs to be on good terms
with the Romans, the Pharisees were a popular party,
the democratic party, with the interests of the people
at heart, and hating the foreign Roman adminis-
tration. 2

A third sect was that of the Essenes. We hear
nothing of these in the Gospels, and it is difficult to
know exactly what part they played in the Jewish

8 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

life as a whole. Not much, perhaps, since their ideal
of existence was rather monastic seclusion, a
separated community life, away from the workaday
world, in the solitude of the Dead Sea plainCI

A fourth sect, only hinted at in the Gospels, was
that of the Zealots. These were the enthusiastic
and pugnacious nationalists of the time, sworn to
throw off the Roman yoke. It was they who tried
on every possible opportunity to make trouble for the
Roman administration. In the religious sense they
were in sympathy with the Pharisees. 4

Therefore, for a new group of Jews to come
together, with ideals drawn from the teaching of
Jesus this was, in itself, at first, nothing out-
rageously strange. We remember Gamaliel's judg-
ment in the Acts of the Apostles that it was best to
wait and see how this new sect should turn out,
whether innocent or harmful, that if it were of God
it would endure, but if not it would soon die away.
This new Jewish-Christian party in the eyes of the
religious leaders of the time was, at the worst, simply
regarded as guilty of minuih, namely, a variety of
Jewish heresy, or, rather, Jewish sectarianism.

All the information we find in Jewish sources
traceable to the first century shows that, in the
beginning, the relations between the Jews and the
Jewish-Christians were amicable; and, what is far
greater matter for surprise, the Jewish attitude to
our Lord Himself is, the earlier we penetrate, marked
by the less degree of hostility. We are forced to
the conclusion that so long as Pharisaic Judaism
(which, we must remember, was the only form of

THE FIRST CHRISTIAN CENTURY 9

Judaism which survived the destruction of Jerusa-
lem) so long as it records personal or almost
personal reminiscence of our Lord, the surviving
record is not viciously hostile (as later became the
case) ; but the farther the Jews were removed from
the time of our Lord's earthly life, and the more
dependent they became for knowledge of Jesus upon
later generations of Christians, then so much the
worse became the Jewish characterization of Jesus.

The actual condemnation of our Lord turned on
the Roman verdict that He was a political danger.
His prosecution was solely in the hands of the Jewish
political leaders, the Sadducees, the priestly caste;
and, in the main, we are safe in concluding that it
was primarily by them that the extreme penalty was
connived at. The moral principles which Jesus laid
down may often have clashed with the principles
advocated by the Pharisees, or by some of them;
but, as Jews nowadays are never tired of insisting,
the ethical and religious teaching of Jesus was
fundamentally Jewish, and can be paralleled in
detail after detail by the teaching of the Pharisaic
religious and ethical code buried in the Talmud.
Therefore it was not the Pharisees who were respon-
sible for Jesus' death ; nor a priori was it impossible
that, after His death, they should retain feelings
towards Him more tolerant in tone than those
which later became the rule.

And such is, more or less, what we find in the early
references. For example, there is a curious passage
in the Talmud 5 which contrasts Jesus with the

heathen prophet Balaam. It runs as follows :
B

xo THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

The nephew of the Emperor Titus wished to
become a Jew. He first raised the ghost of Titus
and asked his advice. Titus advised him not to
become a Jew, because the religious customs of
Israel were too many and too difficult. He then
raised up Balaam, and when he was asked his opinion
about the Jews, he burst out in a rage, exclaiming,
" Seek not their peace nor their good." Then at
last he summoned the spirit of Jesus, who answered,
" Seek their good and do not seek their harm, for
everyone that hurteth Israel is as if he hurt the apple
of God's eye."

So we find that at this time, roughly at the
beginning of the second century, Jesus was regarded
as one well-disposed to Israel.

Another somewhat obscure passage 7 tells how one
of the most respected and venerated of the Rabbis
in the latter half of the first century, namely, Rabbi
Eliezer the Great, was asked his opinion about Jesus,
and he refused to say that he believed that Jesus had
no share in the world to come. That is to say, he
believed that Jesus was a Jew worthy of acceptance
in the sight of God.

This same Rabbi Eliezer the Great is also made to
say that he was attracted by a certain interpretation
of Scripture repeated to him in the name of Jesus. - :-
He was even suspected of a leaning towards minuth,
in the shape of this new Christian- Jewish heresy.

We may now turn to the attitude towards the
first-century Christians generally.
In early elements of the Talmud and the Rabbinic

THE FIRST CHRISTIAN CENTURY n

writings there is frequent reference to minim, persons
guilty of minuth, some form of Jewish sectarianism.
Many of these references are almost certainly aimed
at the early Christians and at the teaching of St. '
Paul. They are partly rules to separate orthodox
Jews from the Christians, and partly warnings
against Christian and particularly Pauline teachings.

Thus we learn that Christian offerings of animals,
meal, wine, fruits, were not valid offerings in the
Temple (though it is not known whether the Phari-
sees, who stated these rules, had any power to
enforce them) ; Christian writings were to be
regarded as books of sorcery; intermarriage with
the Christians was forbidden; copies of the Scrip-
tures written by them were to be destroyed ; also
animals slaughtered by them were forbidden food.

We have much information to show how the more
orthodox Jews tried to guard against the inroad of
Christian beliefs and practices. Perhaps the most
curious is this. The most solemn moment in the
Synagogue service is the repetition of the Shema,
a selection of short passages from the Pentateuch,
beginning, " Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God, the
Lord is one." We are told that in earlier times
the Ten Commandments were included in this
selection of passages; but with the rise of the
Christians the Ten Commandments were left out,
for fear of seeming to support the alleged Christian
view that these were the only laws given to Moses
from Mount Sinai. 10 ! Here we have a curious echo
of our Lord's teaching that the Ten Commandments
and the law of love were at the root of true religion. 11

12 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

There is quite a series of this kind of regulation,
which, notice, aims at excluding the possible
expression of Christian ideas in the actual Synagogue
service itself ; from which we must needs infer that
there was an even closer contact of Christian and
Jew in the Synagogue than we should have supposed
from the Acts of the Apostles. Sometimes it would
seem that the very leaders of the Synagogue worship
were open to suspicion of Christian leanings. Thus a
certain blessing, acclaiming the Kingdom of Heaven,
was usually said in a whisper for fear that the Romans,
should think the sentiment treasonable; but, with
the currency of the Christian idea of the Kingdom of
Heaven, it was ordered that the blessing be said in
a loud voice, 12 because some Jews were suspected of
quietly interpolating Christian sentiments. Later,
as the antagonism of Jews to the Christian- Jewish
brethren grew more acute, there was included in the
Synagogue service a prayer openly denouncing the
minim. 13 But this in itself proved to be insufficient ;
a fresh regulation proved necessary to the effect
that, though it did not greatly matter if the Syna-
gogue reader left out certain passages in the service,
yet, if he left out this " Denunciation of the minim,"
he must go back and repeat it, under penalty of
being suspected of Christianity or some other
variety of minuih. 1 ^

As against the teaching of St. Paul, we find stress
being laid on the importance of works as against
faith. 15 Again, just at this time, the second half of
the first Christian century, we find a series of rulings
denouncing those who evolve new meanings from

THE FIRST CHRISTIAN CENTURY 13

Scripture J & This is most curious and remarkable,
because this kind of thing what we should call
drawing new allegorical interpretations from the
Scriptures was a very favourite habit indeed among
the Rabbis, both before and after this time. But
that Christians, and especially St. Paul, should do
this to further their own purposes, brought the habit
into temporary disrepute among the Rabbis.

Another habit they were accustomed to denounce
just at this time was that of trying to probe the
reasons and the underlying purpose of various of the
laws of Moses. 1 ' Such laws, the Rabbis insisted
(but insisted only temporarily, during the Jewish-
- Christian period), were to be accepted humbly as
divine, arbitrary decrees, and on no account to be
questioned or theorized about. All this seems to
have reference to the Christian arguments (so fre-
quent in the Epistles of St. Paul) which sought to
dethrone the position of the Law of Moses.

These are somewhat vague hints at the Jewish
attitude, showing that relations were such that
common worship in the Synagogue went on for some
time. This could not last, and with the spread of
the teachings of St. Paul, which put aside as un-
necessary the Law of Moses and the Traditions of
the Elders, the Jews took means to make this
common worship impossible. In the end, we find
R. Tarphon asserting bluntly 18 that Christianity
was far more dangerous to Judaism than paganism
was : the Gospels and the writings of the Jewish
Christians must be burnt even if they contain the
names of God ; for while paganism fails to recognize

14 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

the truth of Judaism for want of knowledge, minuth
(in which we must include Jewish-Christianity)
denies what it fully knows.*

Before leaving this first phase, we must touch on
one episode which is most illuminating as showing
the something more, even much more, than tolerant
attitude held by the leading Jews towards the
earliest Christians.

Not many years after the Ascension the head of the
Christians in Jerusalem was James, the brother of
the Lord. Of his manner of life and opinions we
learn something from early Christian tradition and
from the Epistle of James himself in the New Testa-
ment. He was a typical Jewish Christian, observing
scrupulously the Jewish law, and combining this
with the ascetism practised by certain of the early
Christians. From his Epistle we see him as a
characteristic teacher of Jewish piety in its best
form. For the most trustworthy account of his
death we are indebted to the Jewish historian
Josephus.i^ jj e ^ e n s j low Annas the Second, the High
Priest, arrested James together with others, and
brought them before the Sanhedrin and accused
them of being dangerous offenders ; they were put
to death by stoning. Annas was, of course, a
Sadducee, one of the official families who had con-
nived at the crucifixion of Jesus. It is not, then, a

* The substance of the preceding paragraphs sums up the
discussion of the subject in I. H. Weiss, Dor dor v'dor'shav (1891,
reprinted Berlin, 1924), pp. 232-9. It should, however, be
pointed out that though the Jewish Christians were certainly
included among the minim, there is always some uncertainty in
applying any reference to minim specifically to Jewish Christians.

THE FIRST CHRISTIAN CENTURY 15

matter for surprise that during an interim between
the departure of one Roman Governor and the
arrival of his successor, in the year JJ2, the High
Priest seized the opportunity to get rid of the leader
of the Christian sect. But what is a matter worthy
of note is that this condemnation of James, the
brother of the Lord, so aroused the indignation of
the religious leaders of the Jews, that they sent a
protest to Albums, the Roman Governor of Syria,
and to King Agrippa, with the result that Annas the
High Priest was deposed.

This episode leaves us with a fairly good idea of
Christian and Jewish relations in the year 62.

To sum up. So long as Christianity remained
within the confines of Jewish nationality and con-
formed to the elaboration of the laws of Moses, the
Traditions of the Elders, which in a measure served
as the Jewish national passport, then official
Pharisaic Judaism had little quarrel with Christianity
and no hard words to say of its Founder. Dis-
favour, however, began and increased with the
increasing influx of Gentiles into the Christian fold,
and the treatment of the Law as a thing of secondary
importance among Jewish Christians, and as a
non-necessity among Gentile Christians.

We have seen the measures adopted by the Jews
to isolate their Christian brethren. It only wanted
some decisive event to split this dual loyalty of the
Jewish Christians their loyalty to Jesus their
Messiah and their loyalty to Judaea their nation.
That decisive event came with the Jewish rebellion,
in the years 69 and 70.

16 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

The little Jewish race defied the mighty Roman
Empire. It must now fight for its life. Those who
saw in their Jewish nationalism their most valuable
possession rallied round the rebel leaders : even the
Essenes, those Jewish ascetics, who had left the
world for the sake of leading a higher, retired life in
monastic seclusion even they threw in their lot
with the rebels. But the Jewish Christians held
aloof. They left Jerusalem and went to Pella, in
Trans Jordan, opposite Beisan.

One theory 2 has it that the Epistle to the Hebrews
in the New Testament was the final decisive appeal
to the Jewish Christians, urging them to separate
from their Jewish countrymen for good and all.
This Epistle tells, in the allegorical method of the
time, how the crucified Messiah was both the
sacrificial victim and the atoning High Priest, thus
superseding the religious system of the Temple.
" Jesus also," the writer goes on to say, " Jesus also,
that He might sanctify the people through His own
blood, suffered outside the gate. Let us, therefore,
go forth unto Him, without the camp (that is, outside
the Jewish community), bearing His reproach; for
we have here (in Jerusalem) no abiding city." The
same writer likewise tells the Jewish Christians that
they (contrary to the Jewish nationalists) have
received a " kingdom that cannot be shaken." -

In any case the breach was now complete. Chris-
tians no longer felt bound by any allegiance to
Judaism. So Christianity, with all its Jewish
treasures its belief in the divine unity, its Jewish
Messiah as Saviour, Teacher and living exemplar,

THE FIRST CHRISTIAN CENTURY 17

its Jewish scriptures, its moral teaching derived from
the Jewish prophets with these Jewish treasures,
Christianity turned its face wholly to the Gentile
world.

At the time it is most unlikely that this with-
drawal of a few " Jewish sectaries " made much
impression on the Jewish consciousness as a whole.
But it marks the beginning of the stage which still
continues the Jew wandering through the world as
a stranger, watching the world transformed by a faith
which came to the world through the Jews, seeing
this faith only too often misapplied deeds, shameful
in their savagery, done in the name of Christianity,
and seeing himself as a Jew held up in horror and
contempt by the Gentiles as the greatest hater of
Christianity. But, if the Jew did, in truth, become
the deepest hater of Christianity, it was most
certainly the Christian who had the largest share in
making him so.

II

THE TALMUDIC ERA AND EARLY MEDIEVAL

TIMES

IN the first of these lectures we dealt with the
salient points in the relations, so far as we could
learn them, between official Judaism and the
members of the first-century Christian Church.
We saw that what governed these relations was the
attitude of the Church to its Jewish origins. The
original Christians were Jews. Christianity first
appeared as a sect within Judaism. Only after
some decades did it find the need to sever its relations
with its Jewish parent. So long as it remained, even
nominally, within the national confines of Judaism
and observed the Law, the hall-mark of the Jew, it
did not seriously fall foul of official Judaism. We
even had a glimpse of the illuminating fact that, the
earlier we penetrate, the less degree of hostility
marks the Jewish attitude to our Lord Himself.
Only when, through the influence of St. Paul, the
Law was deposed from its primacy and became a
secondary matter for Jewish Christians and a super-
fluity for the Gentile Christian only then was the
issue finally joined and Christianity repelled as a
dangerous heresy.

18

THE TALMUDIC ERA 19

The Jewish Christians met their opponents more
than halfway. When faced by the " acid test " of
their Jewishness the rebellion against the Romans
the Jewish Christians, compelled to choose between
the rival loyalties to their Saviour and to their race,
found that they must throw off allegiance to their
race. Christianity thereby became a faith for the
Gentiles.

What effect had this on the attitude of the parent
Judaism to its daughter faith? The withdrawal
of a comparatively few " Jewish sectaries " could
not be a very noticeable event in the consciousness
of the Jews, torn as they then were by their own
distracting troubles, striving by any means to heal
the wounds of their shattered national body.
Since Christianity ceased to be Jewish it ceased to
be a subject for Jewish attention friendly attention
or hostile attention. Two centuries, almost, were
to pass by, before Christianity was to impinge
upon the Jewish consciousness as an external
factor, to such an extent as to provoke any noticeable
reaction of feeling.

So up to, roughly, the year 150, while Christianity
was still an insignificant sect among the Gentiles,
Jewish records, so far as they speak at all, give one
the impression of an attitude of uninterested, non-
curious, and rather ill-informed tolerance. It is
what we should have expected. Memories of
Christianity's existence within Judaism cannot have
been very strong; perhaps what Jews heard about
the progress of Jewish ideals among the heathen,
even though those ideals had taken Christian shape

20 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

such knowledge might even have afforded them
some measure of gratification.

Early passages in the Talmud still contain hostile
references to the minim, among whom were numbered
the Jewish Christians; but these never refer to
Gentile Christians; they are aimed at those Jews
who, after the destruction of Jerusalem, joined the
Christians and were supposed, rightly or wrongly,
to use their old knowledge of Jews and Jewish ways
to betray their old co-religionists to the civil authori-
ties since, after the Romans had, with such
difficulty, suppressed the Jewish revolt they issued
severe laws against the Jews, in order to break up
any national solidity, or any powers of national
growth of which the Jews might still be capable.
Thus it is that, at an early stage, the passage in the
Synagogue service, to which we called attention in
the last lecture, denouncing the minim or Jewish
Christians was changed. No longer was it the
Christians, as such, on whom curses were called
down, but the malshinim, the Jewish " slanderers,"
renegades, informers, open enemies of the Jewish
race. 1

I must pass as rapidly as possible over these
earlier stages, since I am anxious to devote these
lectures mainly to the more modern aspects of the
subject, and especially to what we may consider
the causative factors of Jewish opinion. This lecture
I shall devote to the more unpleasant points, namely,
the Jewish attitude in Talmudic times (roughly
from A.D. 200 to 600), and the general attitude in
the early Middle Ages.

THE TALMUDIC ERA 21

A great deal of attention has for centuries been
devoted to the real and supposed references to
Christianity in the Talmud. The Talmud has been
condemned as one gigantic piece of anti-Christian
scurrility. Many and many a time the Christian
authorities have tried to suppress it altogether ; for
many centuries a rigorous Christian censorship was
maintained in an attempt to strike out every real or
supposed reference to Christianity or to substitute
something harmless in its place. These attempts at
suppression and censorship have always failed.
The Jews were compelled to submit to the censor-
ship of the printed editions of the Talmud, but
certain manuscript copies have survived unaffected
by the censorship. Also the Jews took pains to
preserve the memory of the censored passages by
making manuscript collections of all the deletions;
and these survive. 2 So it is not difficult to learn
what those references to Christianity were.

But, first of all, what is the Talmud ?

In our Lord's time there existed a mass of what the
Gospels call " the tradition of the elders," namely,
interpretations of the laws of Moses which had been
handed down through several generations by word
of mouth. As the Jewish civilization and society
developed, the primitive laws of Moses did not
always meet the requirements of daily life. Numer-
ous complications arose and disputes as to the
meaning of certain laws, their precise degree of
applicability in changed circumstances, and as to
how far their principles should govern innovations
in daily life never thought of in the old code. There-

22 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

fore, around the laws of Moses a mass of interpreta-
tion accumulated very much as in England,
around the Acts of Parliament, decisions of the law
courts provide a mass of rulings and precedents on
points which, in the original Act, had been left
ambiguous or which had never been foreseen.

Among the Jews these traditions were not reduced
to writing until about the year 200 of our era.
Then they were put together in systematic form,
under six main heads and sixty- three subheadings.
The result is a book nearly twice the length of our
New Testament, known as the Mishnah.

In the course of the next three centuries the
religious leaders of the Jews in Palestine and
Babylonia accumulated another thick layer of
tradition and interpretation around and about this
Mishnah. As we know, the Jews are a disputatious
and legalistically-minded race. During these three
centuries the Jews had no national territory to
govern, so the best minds and energies of the nation
were directed to the interpretation of their national
literature chief and foremost, this Mishnah.

Paragraph by paragraph they discussed this
Mishnah, thrashed out its details, dragged in every
possible subject nearly or distantly related, refur-
bished old traditions confirming or contradicting
what the Mishnah said, dragged in their own con-
temporary ideas on nearly every subject under the
sun. All this they reduced to writing. They did
this in Palestine with one set of arguments and
traditions (some time in the fourth century), and
they did it also in Babylonia, with another and much

THE TALMUDIC ERA 23

more elaborate set of arguments and traditions
(early in the sixth century). The result in the latter
case (the " Babylonian Talmud ") is a huge com-
pilation, equal, at a rough guess, to more than two
volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Its con-
tents defy analysis. It is an unconscious attempt
to collate an entire national tradition religious,
legal, medical, magical, popular folk-lore, historical,
imaginative, speculative and (though it is not easy
to grasp the fact) even humorous. It might be
said to contain virtually everything except an index.

And, of course, it contains some references to
Christianity; but most astoundingly few. In the
main the Jew had already begun the process which
has characterized a great part of Judaism even to
the present day the process of slamming the door,
and locking, barring and bolting his mind against
the whole subject of Christianity.

What, then, do the Talmud references to Christi-
anity amount to? But, first in logical order, we
must try to grasp what, during the fourth, fifth and
sixth centuries, was the attitude of Christianity
to the Jews for, if there is one point which arises
clearly out of our subject of study, it is this : that
Jews have always (and can we blame them ?) based
their notions of Christianity on the conduct of
Christians.

" Antisemitism " is not a modern sentiment.
It is true that the actual words " antisemitism,"
" antisemite," " antisemitic " are barely fifty years
old; but the attitude of mind which they portray
is older than Christianity. Ancient Greek and

24 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

Roman pagan writers seem to have provided almost
the entire stock-in-trade of the modern abusers of
the Jews. They described them as " hated of all
other men/' clannish, atheists and irreligious, said
that they had never helped civilization, that they
were a danger to the Roman Empire, that their
bodies emitted a peculiar odour, that they sacrificed
every year on their altar a specially fattened Greek,
that they hated every other nationality, and that
they were the descendants of lepers who had been
driven out of Egypt. Cicero, Horace, Juvenal,
Martial, Tacitus all helped to add fuel to the
popular feelings of dislike towards the Jews, who
had spread over the length and breadth of the
Empire long before the destruction of Jerusalem
and the rise of Christianity.

When, therefore, Christianity arose and spread and
added its own special measure of hatred against those
who had crucified the Christian Messiah ; and when
Christianity, in the time of the Emperor Constantine,
first became a tolerated and then the dominant
religion of the Empire, we can easily understand the
consequences for the Jews.

From the time of Constantine there was a continual
stream of anti- Jewish legislation, and stronger anti-
Jewish measures were frequently applied locally in
special emergencies. Actually, in themselves, these
anti- Jewish laws were not exceptionally or, some
might even argue, unreasonably oppressive. Thus
the first of the statutes of Constantine enacted that
if the Jews should stone or endanger the life of a
Jewish convert to Christianity, all concerned should

THE TALMUDIC ERA 25

be burnt alive ; 3 such a law merely met violence with
violence. The second part of this statute prohibited
Christians from becoming Jews. Another statute
prohibited Jews from owning Christian slaves.
Another civil law forced the Jews to undertake the
burden of certain public offices whose incidental
expenses had made them undesired positions of
honour. In other respects the Jews had the full
rights of Roman citizenship, and their religious
leaders had the same privileges as the Christian
clergy. 4

Later, the Jews suffered severely in the way of
special levies and taxation, as the direct results of
anti-Christian outbreaks mainly in Alexandria and
Syria. We only know of these anti-Christian out-
breaks from Christian sources. 5 We do not know
what provoked them. Yet, knowing as we do the
reputation of Cyril, the Patriarch of Alexandria, and
the ferocity of the Egyptian monks, and the murder
of Hypatia, we can readily imagine what the treat-
ment of the Jews must have been in moments when
popular hysteria was let loose.

In Galilee the Jews had long possessed some
semblances of self-government under their patriarch
at Tiberias; but these rights were finally (in the
fifth century) crushed out of existence. 6 Christian
provocation constantly incited Jewish reprisals
in turn followed by severe, often vicious, penalties
by the civil authorities. 7

But, as may well be imagined, it is not the sub-
stance of laws that matters, so much as the atmo-
sphere and the spirit in which they are carried out.
c

26 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

We must always admire the enthusiasm of the early
Christian Church ; but we would gladly forget much
of their conduct not only towards the Jews, but even,
at times, towards their fellow-Christians. The
Christian leaders were only too ready on any occasion
to appeal to mob ferocity. It is so much easier for
mankind to revert to its savage instincts than to rise
to the moral standard of the Sermon on the Mount ;
and it was so very much easier for the Christian
leaders to acquire a reputation for religious zeal and
influence by playing on mob passions and the spirit
of vengeance against an already hated race, than to
instil the spirit of forgiveness and to drive home the
teaching of the parable of the Good Samaritan.
Only too well can we understand that the Jews
failed to see Jesus behind the ranks of His reputed
followers.

Something can, of course, be said on the other side.
" The clouds of ignorance and barbarism " then
settling over the world ' ' could not but spread a deeper
gloom over the sullen national character of the
Jews." The Church's manner of carrying on the
contest was not calculated to reduce the bitterness
of Jewish feeling. It was unlikely that " while the
world around them was sinking fast into unsocial
ferocity of manners, (the Jews alone) should acquire
the gentleness and humanity of civilization." 8
Undeserved oppression (or even deserved oppression)
does not make for sweet reasonableness in the
victim. Whenever they could, the Jews always
retaliated in kind; they seized every chance of
siding with the enemies of the Church or the Christian
Empire. In local quarrels during the long-pro-

THE TALMUDIC ERA 27

tracted Arian controversy, the Jews were always in
league with the Arians. 9 And when, shortly before
the Mohammedan conquest, the Persian army
penetrated into Syria and Palestine, it was the Jews
who took the lead in the merciless massacres of the
Christians and the utter destruction of the Christian
Jerusalem. 10

We, however, are more concerned with the
Church's complete failure to show, whenever it was
faced by the Jewish race, the faintest gleam of
Christian feeling, or the least glow of the spirit of
Jesus. Where Jesus Himself, and St. Stephen,
forgave, the Church thought it right to avenge. In
vain had St. Paul urged that " the wrath of man
worketh not the righteousness of God."

I must leave this part of the subject. I have
understated things; or at least I have neglected
details. There are too many of them. Those who
wish can easily learn them. They are quite accessible
in English, either from the mouth of a Christian
historian, Dean Milman, or from a Jewish writer,
Graetz.

We come back to the point from which we started.
What has the Talmud to say of Christianity ?

There is very little ; only scattered hints. These
are, simply, parts of an imaginary picture drawn up
by the Jews an imaginary picture of the only kind
of being who could, in their tortured minds, have
inspired the horror which Christianity had proved
itself to be to the Jews during the past three cen-
turies. Also bear in mind that the Jews who pro-
duced these few and fragmentary elements which go
to make up the imaginative Talmudic picture these

28 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

Jews were Orientals, living fifteen hundred years
and more 'ago, with highly developed powers of
vituperation and few inducements to reticence.
They also paid no regard to historical verisimilitude ;
the imaginary figure which they describe lived,
apparently, both 100 B.C. and 100 A.D. 11

Much of what is now to be quoted from the
Talmud almost certainly did not refer to the Chris-
tian Founder at all ; but later it was supposed to-
partly owing to the malevolent scrutiny and the
hyper-suspicion of the Christian censorship, and
partly owing to the Jews themselves, once they were
goaded into the frame of mind which could find no
vilification too base to express their thoughts of
all that concerned Christianity.

Here is the sum-total of all that the Talmud is
alleged (sometimes rightly, but more often wrongly)
to say of Christianity's Founder :

A certain Yeshu, called the Notsri, or the Son of
Stada, or the Son of Pantera, was born out of wed-
lock. His mother was called Miriam. She was a
women's hairdresser (the word here is M'gadd'la,
a pun on the name Mary Magdalen). Her husband
was Pappus, the son of Yehudah, and her paramour
a Roman soldier, Pantera. She is said to have been
the descendant of princes and rulers. This Yeshu
had been to Egypt, whence he brought back the
knowledge of many tricks of sorcery. He was just a
sorcerer, and so deceived and led astray the people
of Israel; he sinned and caused the multitude to sin.
He made a mock of the words of the learned men and
was excommunicated. He was tainted with heresy.
He called himself God and said that he would go up

THE TALMUDIC ERA 29

to heaven. He was tried before the Court at Lud
on a charge of being a deceiver and teacher of
apostasy. Evidence was procured against him by
concealing witnesses to hear his statements, and a
lamp was so placed that his face could be seen, but
so that he could not see the witnesses. He was
executed in Lud on the Eve of Passover, which fell
on the eve of a Sabbath. During forty days a
herald proclaimed that Yeshu was to be stoned, and
evidence was invited in his favour, but none was
forthcoming. He was stoned and hanged. Under
the name of Balaam he was put to death by " Pin-
has the Robber " (supposed to refer to Pontius
Pilate). At the time he was thirty-three years old.
He was punished in Gehenna by means of boiling
scum. He was " near to the kingdom " (whatever
that may mean). He had five disciples : Mattai,
Naqai, Netser, Buni and Todah. Under the name
of Balaam he was excluded from the world to come. 12
That is all. Certainly to even the least devout
Christian mind it is revolting in the extreme. But
is it not really amazing that it is not worse
far worse? Think of what Christianity had meant
to the Jews for long generations and centuries !
Think again, in a different direction, of the verbosity
of the huge Talmud, and its habit of piling, piling up
everything it could think of about everything it
discussed ! Only think of that, and then we can
only feel surprise that Christianity figures as a mere
half -millionth fragment of the Talmud's interest;
and odious though that half -millionth fragment is,
the real matter for surprise is that it is not infinitely
more disgusting ! Compare it, for example, with

30 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

the mediaeval vituperation against " Mahomet and
the paynims " and the Talmud seems by comparison
almost a model of restraint.

At the time of its compilation long generations
of intense, bitter hatred between Jew and Christian
had been lived through. The Jews repaid Christian
hatred to the utmost that lay in their power except
that the hatred which, on the Christian side, found
its vent in acts of merciless massacre, on the Jewish
side (since the Jews were few and feeble) mostly
evaporated in idle curses. The worst that we find in
the Talmud about Christianity need not surprise us.

Unfortunately this does not by any means take
us to the full depth of degradation into which
Christianity was to sink in the Jewish conception.
Christianity was to show itself a still more bitter
persecutor of the Jewish race always priming itself
for such persecution, if you please, by appealing to
the memory of its Founder. The miserable fact
emerges that it was always the staunchest fighters
for Christendom who were the bitterest persecutors.

I must pass as rapidly as possible over the next
eight or nine centuries. This it is easy to do because
of the sheer monotony of the picture.

In the East Islam had conquered ; and almost
without exception this meant comparative security
for its Jewish subjects. They might be reduced to
a position of social inferiority; but so were the
Christians under Moslem rule.

In the West the Church was all powerful. It
dominated religious and, to a great extent, civil life
as well. Where the Church was strongest, there
Jewish life was most perilous. By the seventh

THE TALMUDIC ERA 31

century Spain had akeady taken the lead in Jewish
persecution, and it was to retain this odious dis-
tinction (such time as it had the power) to the end
of the fifteenth century. These are the sort of laws
we find passed in the Synods of the Church and
ratified by the State. The titles are enough :

" Laws concerning the promulgation and ratifica-
tion of statutes against Jewish wickedness and for
the general extirpation of Jewish errors. That the
Jews may not celebrate the Passover according to
their usage; that the Jews may not contract mar-
riage according to their own customs ; that the Jews
may not practise circumcision ; that the Jews shall
make no distinction of meats ; that the Jews bring
no action against Christians ; of the time when their
converted descendants are admissible as witnesses ;
of the penalties attached to the transgressions of
these statutes by the Jews ; " and so forth. 13

The penalty for these offences was even more
extraordinary than the offences themselves : the
criminal was to be stoned to death, or burnt, by the
hands of his own people.

Moslem conquest soon threatened Spain. The
nearer it came the worse became the troubles of the
Jews. It was now, it is interesting to learn, that
there started the famous fable of the Jewish con-
spiracy against the civilized world, known to our
generation as " The Protocols of the Elders of Zion "
(now duly translated into Arabic for the edification
of the Palestinians). It was at the Council of
Toledo, in 695, that the Gothic king, Egica, announced
the discovery : " Akeady," he states, " already
this people, defiled by the blood of Christ and

32 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

infamous for the profanation of their oaths, have
meditated ruin against the king and kingdom;
proclaiming that their time is come, they have begun
the work of slaughter against the Christians." 14

It really was believed that there was a vast Jewish
confederacy throughout the entire Mediterranean
world to exterminate the Christian faith. Laws
were promptly passed to confiscate all the property
of the Jews, to disperse them as slaves throughout
the country, to seize all then: children under seven,
to bring them up as Christians, marry them to
Christians, and so wipe out for ever the practice of
the Jewish faith. Yet still the Jews survived.

After the Moslem conquest of Spain the centre of
gravity of Christian effort passed to France. France
followed Spain's lead, but not with such consummate
efficiency, for the simple reason that the Church
was not so powerful. But what the leading bishops
could do they did. Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons,
is the leading figure. It is worth noticing that he
introduced the practice of Christian scrutiny of the
Talmud as a stick with which to beat the Jews.
This was early in the ninth century. Archbishop
Agobard was, it must be confessed, one of the most
enlightened Christians of his age; but listen to his
opinion of the Jews :

He calls upon his fellow-bishops to co-operate with
him in separating the Christians from a people who,
he says, " are clothed with cursing as with a garment.
The curse penetrates into their bones, their marrow,
and their entrails, as water and oil flow through the
human body. They are accursed in the city and
in the country, in their births and in their deaths;

THE TALMUDIC ERA 33

their flocks, their meat, their granaries, their cellars,
their magazines are accursed ! " 15

And so we might go on and on with the miserable
panorama. It is only varied by becoming at times
considerably worse. Among the Moslems the Jews
had peace and prospered. But Christianity meant
to them the extremity of savagery and barbarism.
The high-water mark was reached when Christian
chivalry set out on the Crusades.

It is quite impossible to go into details. Wherever
the Crusaders passed through France and the Rhine
Valley on their way to the Holy Land they found an
easy and profitable way of tasting the first-fruits of
Christian conquest over the infidel. " How can
we," they said, " how can we go to the Holy Land to
free it from the infidels while we leave worse infidels
behind us, those who crucified our Saviour ! " I
am glad that time does not allow me to describe
what happened. The acts were those of a fanatic
mob in the extreme stages of religious intoxication.
We can imagine the terrible cry of Hep (supposed to
stand for the initial letters of Hierosolyma est
perdita, Jerusalem is fallen) this cry of Hep, the
signal for the massacre of the Jews, running through
the cities of the Rhine with frightful results. 16 It
happened in the first, the second, and to a less degree
in the third Crusade : the blood of the Jew was as
conspicuous a mark of the Crusader as the cross on
his breast.

Fortunately, it is not my purpose to give a history
of these times : my sole purpose is to show what
Jews have thought of Christianity, and, especially,
Why!

34 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

I have gone into the story of the times at such
length simply to prepare you for the mediaeval
popular Jewish idea of Christianity. We need not
be surprised (and we have no right to complain)
however bad that idea should turn out to be.

Once more the Jewish popular mind drew up its
own imaginary picture of the Founder of Christianity
and His life. It based this on the imaginary details
already contained (and obviously gloated over) in
the Talmud. These details it amplified and adorned
with everything which Jewish contempt and loathing
could think of, to the discredit of Christianity. The
result is known under various titles : " The History
of Yeshu," " The Story of him who was hanged,"
" The Story of that one and his son," and the like. 17
It is an unseemly relic of ancient times, a pitiful
device by which the tortured imaginations of the
Jews revenged themselves on the Christians. But,
with all this, we must remember that whatever
discredit it brings upon those who concocted it,
it brings in every one of its disgusting details an even
greater, a much greater, discredit upon those whose
cruelty provoked it.

You will recognize in the course of the summary
which I am about to give, that it is mainly a perver-
sion and caricature of a few half -heard details from
the Gospels. Here are the outlines of the story :
details it is quite impossible to give.

Johanan, a pious youth of Jerusalem, is betrothed
to Miriam, the daughter of a Bethlehem widow.
Joseph Pant era, of the tribe of Judah, forms a plan
to seduce Miriam and effects his purpose one Sabbath
eve. Three months afterwards the pious Johanan

THE TALMUDIC ERA 35

realizes what has happened and suspects Joseph
Pantera; but having no proof he deserts Miriam
and flees to Babylonia. In course of time Miriam
bears a son who is called Yeshu. The boy is placed
under the tuition of a learned Rabbi, yet by his very
conduct, which is disrespectful to the sacredness of
Jewish tradition, he makes the Rabbis suspect his
birth. Yeshu is expelled from the community.
He first went to Upper Galilee, and thence to
Jerusalem, where he contrived to learn in the
Temple the secret of the sacred Name of God, and
with the help of this he was able to work miracles.
The leaders of the Jews, becoming alarmed at his
unprincipled behaviour, set up one of themselves as
a rival magician. This rival was called Judas.
The priests allowed Judas to learn the sacred name
so that he too could work miracles ; they arranged
a trial of strength between him and Yeshu, in which
the latter was defeated. Yeshu was condemned to
death but managed to escape. Judas followed him,
disguised as one of his disciples, and contrived to
steal from him the parchment on which Yeshu had
written the sacred name and which he kept hidden
in a cut in his flesh. Yeshu, in order to learn the
name once more, went again to Jerusalem. There
Judas betrayed him to the rulers. He was captured,
scourged, stoned, and hanged upon the stalk of
a cabbage, because no tree would consent to bear
him. After he was dead, Judas stole the corpse
and threw it into the ditch of his garden. The dis-
ciples not finding the body said that Yeshu had
risen from the dead. Helena, who was then queen,
believed them, and threatened the Jews with death.

36 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

The body, however, was discovered and dragged
before the queen at the tail of a horse. The Chris-
tians were furious against the Jews; so one of the
latter, by name Simon Kephas, undertook to make
peace by completely separating the Christians from
the Jews. He learned the sacred name, worked
miracles, and having thus gained the confidence of
Yeshu's followers, he gave them, in Yeshu's name,
new laws of religion. They accepted his teaching.
He then withdrew himself to a tower, specially
built for him, where he remained till his death.
After his death a new teacher arose in Rome and
set aside the laws given by Simon Kephas, and gave
new ones, instituting baptism instead of circum-
cision, and Sunday instead of the Sabbath. The
new teacher, however, in trying to perform a miracle,
was killed by a stone falling upon his head. " So,"
the document ends, " so let all thine enemies perish,
O Lord."

Naturally it was long before such a story as this
found its way into print. But there is plenty of
evidence showing how widespread it was throughout
the Middle Ages, from the sixth century onwards.
There are several versions of it, all delighting in the
most odious details, all mixed up with wonder-
stories and low comedy and word-play, which
Jewish wit then, as now, takes great delight in.

An apology must be offered for suffering such
things to reach Christian ears. But they have to be
reckoned with as an essential element in Jewish
mediaeval thought, and even belief, about Christian
origins. Furthermore, what is most important in
our present study, they are a formative element in

THE TALMUDIC ERA 37

the general " make-up " of the present-day Jewish
mind at least of those Jews who are still only a
generation removed from the atmosphere of purely
Jewish thought. It is quite true that many, or
most, Westernized Jews are quite ignorant of this
document in question. A short time ago a professor
of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem alleged that
it was only recently that he came to know that there
was such a book in existence ; but he confessed that
he had known its contents from his very earliest years.

And there we have the main point. All through
the centuries the Jews have cherished these scurrilous
details. Whether they were true or not did not
matter : they were a highly treasured, private
form of vengeance in return for the attitude of the
Christians towards the Jews. They could not retort
by physical means, but they did retort in this even
more effective way, by reducing, within their own
Jewish circles, Christianity and its Founder to
contempt and ridicule. We learn that the Jews of
Eastern Europe till quite recently used to celebrate
Christmas by reading aloud this horrid caricature in
their family circles.

In all this, how can we dare to insist that blame
rests solely or even mainly upon the Jews? In
utter shame I have been compelled to slur over
quickly the glaring, appalling, abhorrent details of
official Christendom's treatment of those, our
Lord's brethren according to the flesh. Our Lord's
charter to His Church was, " Let your light so shine
before men that they may see your good works and
glorify your Father which is in heaven." Whatever
success has followed the progress of the Church

38 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

throughout the world in spreading the Gospel,
however great its service in spreading the spiritual
light of Christianity throughout the dark places of
the world, we have to set on the other side of the
scale the dead weight of the criminal conduct of the
Church in its failure to follow even the least of its
Lord's commands, whenever it was brought face to
face with the scattered Jewish race. It might even
seem that God has permitted the Jewish race to
persist as a permanent reproach to Christianity : a
glaring reproach of Christianity's failure.

We may not free ourselves of blame and think that
it was only a failure of the Church in the past. The
Christian Church, the body of Christ, is one : in
time and in space. The sins of the past must either
be borne by us or be repented of by us. The effects
of those past sins still continue. How we can best
repent of those past sins of the Church and how we
can receive God's pardon for them, that, in our
perplexity, must be the substance of our most
penitent prayers.

One thing, however, we can know of a surety, that
if we would remove the reproach of the past, then
we must realize our failure as a Church to show forth
the spirit of our blessed Lord and Saviour in just
those times and places where it might have worked
the greatest power.

So far as the Jews are concerned, let us not deceive
ourselves for one moment : the Church, by its
deliberate choice and conduct, has made itself one
gigantic and seemingly impenetrable obstacle
between them and the .figure of our blessed Lord.

Ill

FROM THE CRUSADES TO THE

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

<*

IN the preceding lectures we have seen what was
the Jewish attitude to Christianity from the first
century to the time of the Crusades. Christianity
was first a sect within Judaism ; in the earliest stages
neither Christianity nor its Founder met with
extreme hostility. But the teaching of St. Paul as
to the non-necessity of the Jewish Law, or, rather,
its abrogation in the Christian scheme of things
this caused Christianity to be ostracized by official
Judaism, while the Jewish revolt against Rome
finally severed the Jewish members of the Christian
Church from their Jewish origins and their allegi-
ance to the Jewish nation. In the course of the
next five centuries, with Christianity dominant in the
Roman Empire, Christian enthusiasm found an
outlet in persistent Jewish persecution, ranging from
harassing legal inconveniences to acts of passionate
mob violence. Even in the pre-Christian Roman
Empire the Jews had been a hated race : Christianity
intensified this hatred and, as its peculiar contribu-
tion, added the element of religious vengeance under
the guise of Christian piety.

39

40 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

The direct or indirect effects of this treatment we
find reflected in the real and supposed references to
Christianity in the Talmud. These references amount
to no more than perversions of half-understood details
in the Gospels. They are far from being a cause of
horror at the depravity of the Jewish mind : their
altogether astonishing scarcity ought rather to
be a reason for surprise at Jewish restraint. Still,
it would be wrong to crown the Jews prematurely
with a halo of suppose we call it Christian charity
and forbearance ! The final form of the Talmud took
shape in Babylonia, where its compilers were under
Persian rule. Christianity was not prominent in
their lives : it was just an inconspicuous contempo-
rary, sharing equally with the Jews in whatever
measures of State persecution were launched from
time to time by the Persian rulers. Also, the Jews
had already adopted the plan which they later found
to serve their interests best closing their minds
entirely to the whole subject of Christianity.

After the rise of Islam the Jews had comparative
peace in the East ; but this was more than counter-
balanced by their sufferings in the West, where the
Church for some centuries was all-powerful over
souls and bodies. First Spain, then France, became
centres of highly concentrated anti- Jewish policy.
To the Jews, the Christian leaders must have ap-
peared the symbol of intolerance and cruelty, and
the Christian rank and file as the embodiment of
savagery and barbarity. This barbarity, always in
the guise of pious Christian enthusiasm, reached its
height in the Crusades.

THE CRUSADES 41

The Jews, utterly incapable of retorting physically
in kind, retorted in the only way that remained open
to them the rendering of Christianity ridiculous
and contemptible within their own circles. Thus
arose that mediaeval Jewish legend, giving a gro-
tesque, unseemly and, from the Christian point of
view, blasphemous account of the Christian Saviour
and the early days of Christianity. This legend
a puerile, imaginative bogey-story, perverting the
Gospel narratives, making what was good in them
odious, and transforming the traitor Judas into a
national Jewish hero this legend played its part in
mediaeval thought ; and although most modern Jews
are ignorant of it as an anti-Christian document, its
poison has, to an indeterminate extent, become a
formative element in the conscious or unconscious
attitude of Judaism towards Christianity.

Going back a little, there is a somewhat brighter
picture to be painted of the days in Spain which saw
the close of the Moslem occupation and the gradual
revival of Christian power. The Jews look back to
these centuries of their existence in Spain as the
golden age of Judaism. They were tolerated,
allowed, to acquire landed property, and to conduct
their own affairs ; they became wealthy, respected ;
they were the chief representatives of the learning
and science of the day. As a little side-picture it is
worth recording how a certain Jewish philosopher
and poet, Solomon Ibn Gabirol (d. 1070), gained a
great reputation amongst the Christian philosophers

of the succeeding generations among those who
D

42 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

created the mediaeval scholastic system of philosophy.
Thus Albertus Magnus, St. Thomas Aquinas and
Duns Scotus, all busied themselves with the writings
of this Solomon Ibn Gabirol. But they did not know
that he was a Jew : they refer to him as " a certain
Arab Avicebron " or " Avicebrol " ; and they seem
doubtful whether he were not, in fact, a Christian. 1

The few Jewish references to Christianity which
we meet at this period reflect the atmosphere of
peace and toleration in which the Jews were living.
These opinions are, uniformly, gravely argued,
restrained and appreciative of the good in Christian-
ity. As might be expected, they dispute on philoso-
phical grounds such Christian doctrines as the
divinity of Christ, and the Holy Trinity ; yet they are
without rancour and bitterness. Such, for example,
is the case with the great Jewish teacher Sa'adiah,
the translator of and commentator on the Arabic
Biblev 2 Again, the famous Jewish poet, Judah ha-
Levi (d. 1140), hails Christianity as sharing the same
root with Judaism, and considers that it is one of the
preparatory steps towards the time of Messianic bliss,
in which it, Christianity, will have a share. 3 Another
Jewish figure, greater than either of these two,
namely, Maimonides, the Jewish physician of Saladin,
recognizes Christianity as fulfilling the divine pur-
pose of preparing the way for the coming of the
Messiah ; for, he says, it has spread the words of the
Scriptures and the law of truth over the wide world. 4
Following Maimonides, the rabbinical authorities all
sharply differentiate Christianity from what were,
in Jewish eyes, idolatrous faiths : Christians were to

THE CRUSADES 43

be regarded as " proselytes of the gate," that is,
near akin in beliefs, although merely Gentiles.

Unfortunately, as Christianity more and more
recovered from the shock of the Moslem conquests
in Europe, the Jews once again came into their old
heritage of hatred and contempt. Spain again was
to take the lead.

It is also about this stage that the wealth of many
of the Jews began to be such an exasperation to their
Christian neighbours. Under the feudal system the
Jews were regarded as so many cattle, attached to
the soil, and the personal property of this or that
baron who found their money-producing qualities
extremely helpful. The Jews, as the only purveyors
of ready money, were, in turn, patronized and pro-
tected by kings and princes, who constantly had need
of them; and, in turn, robbed and denounced as
blood-sucking parasites and hateful usurers when-
ever Gentile indebtedness to them threatened to be
embarrassing. And so it is that, for continuous
centuries, we find decree after decree issued by rulers
throughout Europe annulling interest on debts owed
to Jews or, as often as not, confiscating the debts
for the benefit of the royal treasuries and driving the
Jews out of the country. At need it was always
possible in this way for a Christian king, actuated by
religious motives, to wreak vengeance on the enemies
of Christ. Thus we find the French king, St. Louis,
in 1234, issuing a statute stating that " for the welfare
of his soul and the souls of his father and all his
ancestors, he annulled one third of all debts due to
Jews." 5

44 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

To read the history of the Jews in Europe during
these centuries is one of the most monotonously
depressing things imaginable. There is scarcely a
ray of relief. The great religious orders, the Fran-
ciscans and Dominicans, had arisen; but never a
leader do we find who, in the spirit of St. Francis,
should preach the love of God over all His works
even over the Jews. The widespread pestilence,
known as the " Black Death," appeared and re-
appeared during the fourteenth century. Throughout
France, Spain and Germany came the same outcry :
it was the Jews who had been poisoning the wells.
How otherwise should the Christians die by the
scores of thousands while the Jews seemed to remain
immune? Widespread massacres of Jews followed.
But then we should remember that, in Italy, at an
earlier date, some poor Jews were even executed
because of an earthquake. 6

The venerable charge against the Jews, of killing a
Christian child in order to use its blood for the
Passover ritual this was asserted and repeated in
every Christian country where Jews were to be found.
This horrid charge, even more absurd than horrid,
has been brought against Jews and men have
always been found to believe its truth since pre-
Christian times even to the present day (it was
revived in Lithuania last year ; it was heard in Port
Said five years ago, and it was even hinted at in
Jerusalem shortly afterwards). It is one of the
curiosities of history; but it has had fatal conse-
quences for the Jews; for nothing has so served
to perpetuate and exasperate anti- Jewish feelings

THE CRUSADES 45

among simpler-minded Christians as this charge.
Our own English saints, St. Hugh of Lincoln and
St. William of Norwich, serve to remind us that the
Jews have suffered the same calumny even in
England's " green and pleasant land." Some of you
will remember how Chaucer, in the Prioress's Tale,
has embalmed the legend in an only too exquisitely
pathetic setting.

The revival of the Church's power in Spain spelled
all manner of miscellaneous oppressive methods
against the now wealthy Jews. Thousands found it
easier to accept the form of baptism and so retain
their wealth and security while remaining Jews at
heart. This leads us to the final terrible closing
scenes of Christian and Jewish relations in Spain.
These nominal Jewish-Christians, or Crypto- Jews,
or New Christians, or Marranos, as they were vari-
ously called, were suspected of secretly judaizing.
The clergy of Spain called in the help of the Inquisi-
tion. This was in 1480.

Those of us who belong to the Reformed Churches
think of the Inquisition solely as a weapon in the
hands of the unref ormed Church against Protestants.
But to the Jewish mind the Inquisition was primarily
aimed against the Jews against those scores of
thousands of them who had accepted the form of
baptism under compulsion while remaining Jews at
heart. And bitterly did those Jews suffer. Details
need not be given. The fact remains that with the
-Jew of to-day, far more than with the most per-
fervidly imaginative Protestant, the Inquisition has
burnt itself into his inmost being as the worst of

46 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

horrors conceivable, the most hideous nightmare in
his national past. Till one has grasped this fact, it is
strange to notice how promptly and persistently
this idea comes up to-day from Jewish lips and
Jewish pens : " Inkvisitzia " and Torquemada are
to them the commonest terms of comparison
whenever they would describe oppression ; they are
commoner even than " Czarist Russia."

Twelve years later, 1492, saw the whole body of
Jews hounded out of Spain, 300,000 in number.
The horrors and sufferings were unspeakable. And
it was all done in the name of Holy Mother Church.

Covering this period, up to the end of the fifteenth
century, there is little we can lay hold of for the
subject of these lectures : namely, the expression of
Jewish thought about Christianity outside ordinary
controversy. We can without the least difficulty
suppose that the Jews found no reason to change the
libellous, blasphemous notions about the origins of
Christianity which had done duty for centuries past.
We are, in fact, able to trace a new and more bitterly-
worded recension of the mediaeval " History of
Yeshu " stories, specially adapted to the mentality
of the Jews of the later Middle Ages. In Spain and
France there were many public disputations between
Christians and Jews; but these were nothing more
than verbal tournaments, turning on artificial inter-
pretations of Scripture for the most part.

Yet it is from a Spanish Jew at the end of the
fifteenth century that we have a judgment on Chris-
tianity which, you will agree, is well worth recording.
It is the opinion of a strictly orthodox Jew, Joseph
Yaabetz by name, one of the victims of the expul-

THE CRUSADES 47

sion of 1492. He records with gratitude the work
of Christianity as teaching a belief in the one Divine
Creator, in divine revelation, retribution for sin, and
the resurrection. He goes so far as to say (and he
says it without the cynicism which one would suspect,
not unreasonably, to be behind it), that "but for
the example of these Christian nations we might
ourselves have become infirm in our faith during
our long dispersion." 7

This is, indeed, heaping " coals of fire." In the
circumstances I think it would be difficult to find
a more exact fulfilment of St. Paul's prescription
of Christian charity : " Charity suffereth long and
is kind ... is not provoked, taketh no account of
evil, rejoiceth not in unrighteousness, but rejoiceth
with the truth."

The beginning of the sixteenth century marks a
great change. It is the dawn of the Reformation;
it is immediately after the invention of printing ; the
centre of gravity of Jewish life in Europe is now in
Germany ; the feudal system is either forgotten or a
powerless form ; the Church's power is still immense,
but it has to cope with difficult matters of purely
mundane state-craft, in which religion as often as
not served only as a pawn in a diplomatic game.

With the Reformation we instinctively associate
a new interest in the Scriptures. With this new
interest came the first widely expressed desire to
know the originals the Old Testament in Hebrew
and the New Testament in Greek. In this con-
nection we at once think of Erasmus. But there
was a greater man than Erasmus, one whose name is

48 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

known to comparatively few one who took the lead
in introducing the study of Greek and Hebrew to the
students of Europe. This was John Reuchlin. 8

In searching out the many and various causes and
streams of thought which culminated in the Refor-
mation, it is strange to find that by no means one
of the least prominent was the Talmud this much-
abhorred Jewish Talmud.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century a strong
anti- Jewish campaign was launched by the Domini-
cans of Cologne, headed by their Prior, Jacob van
Hoogstraten. Hoogstraten seems to have aimed at
securing for the Dominicans in Germany the same
powerful position which they held in Spain owing
to the Inquisition. The Dominicans secured the
services of a converted Jew, Joseph Pfefferkorn. 9
Pfefferkorn, at the instance of his Dominican
patrons, wrote a series of pamphlets exhorting the
Jews to embrace Christianity ; but the principal aim
in the pamphlets was to persuade the Christian world
that all Jewish writings were written in a tone bitterly
hostile to Christianity, and that these writings, the
Talmud first and foremost, should be destroyed whole-
sale and utterly, as pernicious blasphemies.

The Dominicans brought influence to bear on the
Emperor, Maximilian. He ordered that all Jewish
writings (except the Old Testament) should be
destroyed throughout the whole of Germany. To
the converted Jew, Pfefferkorn, he gave authority to
carry out the necessary searches in the synagogues
and private houses of the Jews. This was in the
year 1509. The Jews were forced to hand over to
him every book they possessed.

THE CRUSADES 49

But the Jews were now no longer the helpless
sheep of earlier centuries. They protested, and
through the intervention of the Archbishop of
Cologne, the actual destruction of the confiscated
books was delayed, and the Emperor was persuaded
that it would be more just to have the books first of
all scrutinized by experts, who should examine into
the truth of the wholesale and very serious charges
brought by Pfefferkorn.

John Reuchlin was the expert chosen. He was
the only Christian in Germany, possibly even in all
Europe, who knew Hebrew well enough to report on
the nature of the vast post-biblical Hebrew literature.

Meanwhile the intense anti- Jewish propaganda of
the Dominicans, the stream of pamphlets, in both
German and Latin, turned out from the printing
press served to rouse popular feelings to an unusual
pitch. Those feelings became more exasperated
and embittered by a charge, brought against the
Jews in the Brandenburg district, of stealing and
desecrating the consecrated Eucharistic wafers, and
of killing a Christian child for the purposes of the
Passover ritual. These charges were taken as proved,
and thirty Jews were burnt in Berlin. It was at
this stage that John Reuchlin drew up his report :
" Whether it was godly, laudable and advantageous
to Christianity to burn the Jewish writings, especially
the Talmud."

He decided (as, of course, any unprejudiced person
was bound to decide) that to condemn all Jewish
writings indiscriminately would be foolish. He
divided them into six categories; of these he con-
sidered that there should be destroyed only those

50 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

deliberate perversions of the Gospels and the puerile
fables known as the " History of Yeshu." As for
the rest, they ought to be preserved in the interests
of science and true learning and for the promotion
of a sound knowledge of the Scriptures.

It was a very brave act. Reuchlin dared to put
forward this view in the teeth of the most powerful
element in the Church, and in the teeth of popular
prejudice at a moment when anti- Jewish feeling was
at its maximum.

Reuchlin went even further : he argued that the
Jews were citizens of the Holy Roman Empire, and
as such were entitled to its full privileges and pro-
tection; also, since the Jews stood outside the
Roman Church and were not bound to hold the
Christian faith, the Roman Church could therefore
have no jurisdiction over them, whether over their
bodies or their minds.

Reuchlin sent his report to the Archbishop of
Cologne. It was intercepted and opened by the
Dominicans. Pfefferkorn promptly drafted - an
answer and a rebuttal. This the Dominicans pub-
lished in German and circulated widely. In it they
openly denounced Reuchlin as a heretic. What
made Reuchlin most indignant was that they alleged
that he was in the pay of the Jews and 'that he did
not really know Hebrew, and that he was the
instrument of Satan.

It is not easy to picture to ourselves the sensation
stirred up by this pamphlet, the " Handspiegel,"
Pfefferkorn' s attack on Reuchlin. It was circulated
in thousands of copies. Since the invention of
printing this was the first attack on a highly placed

THE CRUSADES 51

dignitary of the State, such as was Reuchlin. It
was the first printed libel. Being written in German
everyone could understand it. Reuchlin was forced
to answer publicly in a counter-pamphlet and to
make the Talmud a personal question, and a verit-
able landmark in history he was compelled openly
to defend the Jews. As for his opponent, Pfeffer-
korn, the accuser of the Jews, Reuchlin publicly
branded him as a scandalmongering liar.

Well might the Jews of the day rub their eyes and
ask whether they were dreaming. A prominent
Christian had publicly protected them and their
writings and actually claimed that the Gospels taught
that a Christian should treat even a Jew as his neigh-
bour and love him as himself !

The controversy waged for another ten years.
Around Reuchlin were ranked all the humanists of
the day, Erasmus, Melancthon, Martin Luther all
those spirits who ushered in the continental Refor-
mation. On the other side, behind Pfefferkorn,
was the entire Dominican order (the Franciscans, it is
curious to note, took Reuchlin' s part) and the organ-
ized Church, struggling to maintain its authority
against the new rush of modern learning and the
plague of unsettling convictions which the new
learning was stirring up.

In the end the Pope condemned Reuchlin on
principle. But, none the less, the ten-year-old
decree, ordering the destruction of the Talmud and
other Hebrew writings, was not revived.

Reuchlin had aroused the interest of the Christian
world in the Talmud and Jewish writings ; it was a
friendly interest and not the hostile interest which

52 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

alone had existed in the past. During his lifetime
there were printed for the first time the Rabbinical
Bible (that is, the Old Testament in Hebrew with
Aramaic translation and garlands of Hebrew com-
mentaries), and the Talmud in fifteen folio volumes.
By the year 1543 the same printer had published
altogether some eighty Jewish works, great and
small. This printer, Daniel Bomberg of Antwerp,
was a Christian.

Martin Luther, during the earlier part of his life,
was a faithful and worthy pupil of Reuchlin. He
too lifted his voice, in his blunt, outspoken, and
sometimes crude way, to point out things which are
so obviously true, but. things which in those days
had barely struck the consciences of mankind, and
things which even in our own day are more often
forgotten than remembered.

Luther's remarks are worth quoting at some
length. They are as startling as they are sometimes
crude.

" Those fools, the Papists, Bishops, sophists,
monks, have formerly so dealt with Jews that every
good Christian would have rather been a Jew. And
if I had been a Jew and seen such stupidity and such
blockheads reign in the Christian Church, I would
rather be a pig than a Christian. They have treated
the Jews as if they were dogs, not men, and as if
they were fit for nothing but to be reviled ; whereas
they are blood-relations of our Lord; therefore if
we respect flesh and blood, the Jews belong to Christ
more than do we. I beg therefore, my dear Papists,
if you become tired of abusing me as a heretic, that
you begin to revile me as a Jew.

THE CRUSADES 53

" Therefore," he goes on to say, " it is my advice
that we should treat them humanely; but now we
drive them by force, treating them deceitfully and
ignominiously, saying they must have Christian
blood to wash away the Jewish stain, and I know
not what more nonsense. Also we prohibit them
from working amongst us, from living and having
social intercourse with us, forcing them, if they would
remain with us, to become usurers. If we would
help them, then must we exercise, not the law of the
Pope, but that of Christian love. We must receive
them kindly and allow them to compete with us in
earning a livelihood, so that they may have an
opportunity to witness Christian life and doctrine;
and if some remain obstinate, what of it? Not
every one of us is a good Christian." 10

Elsewhere Luther speaks of the Jews as the instru-
ments of God's revelation to man : " The Jews are
of the best blood on earth; " "through them alone
the Holy Spirit wished to give all the books of Holy
Scripture to the world. They are the children, and
we are the guests and strangers. Indeed, like the
Canaanitish woman, we should be satisfied to be the
dogs that eat the crumbs which fall from their
master's table." n

And yet in his later years Luther became the
bitterest enemy of the Jews. His terrific vocabulary
and force of language were turned against instead
of for the Jews. This is what we now find him
saying :

"Doubt not, beloved in Christ, that after the devil
you have no more bitter, venomous, violent enemy
than the real Jew." As to what should be done

54 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

with the Jews, Luther recommends : " Burn their
synagogues and schools; what will not burn, bury
with earth, that neither stone nor rubbish remain.
In like manner, break into and destroy their houses.
Take away all their prayer-books and Talmuds, in
which is nothing but godlessness, lies, cursing and
swearing. Forbid their Rabbis to teach on pain of
life and limb." 12

After admonishing his hearers not to have the
slightest intercourse with the Jews, he says : "If
that which you already suffer from the Jew is not
sufficient, strike him in the jaw ... if I had power
over them I would assemble their most prominent
men and demand that they prove that we Christians
do not worship the one God, under the penalty of
having their tongues torn out through the backs of
their necks." 13

This radical change of heart in so great a man,
this lapse from Christian charity to the grossest
intemperance, should make us pause and take very
careful thought. Luther may have been disap-
pointed by the Jews; he is supposed to have
suspected a Jewish attempt to poison him; all
manner of explanations have been offered to account
for so radical a change. But primarily the change
goes to show this : that, even in the case of so great
a Christian as Luther, it needed only the removal of
certain inhibitions, it needed only the slackening of
certain controls exercised over mankind by the due
practice of the Christian virtues of humble-minded-
ness, love and obedience to our Lord and Master,
and the open-eyed facing of truth it needed only

THE CRUSADES 55

the slackening of these, the hardly acquired Christian
virtues, and once these controls falter or slacken, for
whatever reason, then at once, the age-long, inbred,
instinctive Jew-hatred breaks loose. Centuries of
.Christianity of a kind have made it a Christian
instinct to loathe the Jew; to overcome that im-
planted instinct has now become one of the severest
disciplines in the practice of the Christian life.

In pursuing the subject of these addresses it is
possible to pick out only a few illustrative episodes.
The field of Jewish history is so huge being virtually
a complete survey of world-history wherever the
Jew enters into the picture; and there are few
countries and times in which Jews have not figured.
I have tried to limit the choice to episodes which in
themselves each marked the beginning of a new
phase in Christian- Jewish relations. Once such a
new phase is begun, usually it becomes continuous,
lasting in many cases even to modern times just as
the blood-accusation libel, which first took precise
form in Norwich, in the thirteenth century, continues
to be charged against the Jews to the present day,
and is even becoming more frequent. This sense of
continuity in the quality of Christian- Jewish relations
is constantly being aroused in most curious fashion.

For the later seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries I would draw your attention to three
Christians who have influenced these relations : the
influence of one was bad, though he meant well;
a second had an influence which was thoroughly
pernicious; while the influence of the third was
thoroughly good.

56 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

John Christopher Wagenseil was an industrious
Christian Hebraist who exerted all his energies in
collecting Jewish works controverting Christian
doctrines or attacking Christianity in cruder style.
This collection he published in 1681, under the highly
intriguing title Tela ignea Satance the fiery darts
of the devil. His intention was quite without
malice. He hoped to persuade the leaders of the
Church that it was their duty to take an oath from
all Jews that they would utter no word of mockery
against Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the Cross and the
Christian Sacraments. Incidentally he emphasized
his belief that it was wrong to " scorch and burn the
Jews, to rob them of all their property, or to drive
them with their wives and families out of the
country."

Wagenseil wrote also a pamphlet exposing the
falsehood of the popular belief that the Jews used
the blood of Christians. " It might/' he says, " in-
deed pass if the matter stopped with idle gossip;
but that on account of this execrable falsehood the
Jews have been tormented, punished and executed
by thousands, should move even stones to com-
passion and make them cry out." 14

Wagenseil was, however, followed by John Andrew
Eisenmenger. 15 He compiled (in the year 1700) a
malicious book whose title well describes its con-
tents. This is it :

" Judaism exposed : or an original and true
account of the way in which the stubborn Jews
frightfully blaspheme and dishonour the Holy
Trinity, revile the Holy Mother of Christ, mockingly

THE CRUSADES 57

criticize the New Testament, the Evangelists, the
Apostles and the Christian religion, and despise and
curse to the uttermost extreme the whole of Chris-
tianity. At the same time much else besides, either
not at all or very little known, and gross errors of
the Jewish religion and theology, as well as ridiculous
and amusing stories, herein appear. All proved
from their own books. Written for the honest in-
formation of all Christians."

Eisenmenger's purpose was to hurl back Wagen-
seil's " Fiery darts of the devil " with deadly aim
against the Jews themselves. Furthermore, all that
other material about alleged Jewish abominations,
which Wagenseil had collected and exposed as false-
hoods all these Eisenmenger refurbished and
presented as indisputable facts. For example, he
gave lengthy proofs that Jews were forbidden to save
a Christian from death; he repeated all the stories
of murders of Christians by Jews, of the poisoning of
wells by Jews in the time of the Black Death, the
ritual murders in fact, everything which had ever
been alleged against the Jews, whether through simple
ignorance, deliberate fraud or excited fanaticism.

By heavy bribery the Jews succeeded in delaying
the publication of this work. But it was ultimately
published after Eisenmenger's death. It has ever
since proved an inexhaustible armoury for malicious
opponents of the Jews. The name of Eisenmenger
is burnt deep into the suffering soul of the Jew.

Altogether admirable, however, is the figure of
William Surenhuysius, 16 a Christian scholar of

Amsterdam. After years of labour he produced
E

58 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

between 1698 and 1703 a Latin translation with
commentaries of the entire Mishnah. He desired
that Christian youths training for theology and the
ministry of the Church should not devote themselves
to the seductions of classical literature, but by
engaging in the study of the Mishnah serve, as it
were, a sacred noviciate :

" He who desires to be a good and worthy disciple
of Christ must either first become a Jew, or first learn
thoroughly the language and culture of the Jews, and
become Moses' disciple before he joins the Apostles,
in order that he may be able through Moses and the
Prophets to convince men that Jesus is the Messiah."

He was outspoken in his contempt for those who,
like Eisenmenger, picked over Jewish writings with
ulterior motives, like, he says, " highwaymen, who,
after they have robbed an honest man of all his
clothes, beat him to death with cudgels or send him
away with scorn."

In all this I have almost entirely neglected to give
the Jewish reaction to show whether, or how,
Jewish opinion of Christianity was affected by the
post-Reformation attitude to the Jews. We are at
once met by the remarkable fact that there is no such
thing as a recognizable Jewish anti-Christian litera-
ture that is to say, a literature in the least corre-
sponding to the type represented by the gigantic
bulk of Christian anti- Jewish (or, as it later came
to be called, anti-Semitic) literature. All Wagen-
seil's efforts produced little more than that early
Jewish parody of the Gospels, and Isaac of Troki's
Hizzuk Emunah the Protection of the Faith and

THE CRUSADES 59

the reports of one or two Christian Jewish public
disputations. The Gospel parody may be put on
one side as a thing standing by itself. The others
are nothing more than philosophical arguments
according to the fashion of the time and rival inter-
pretations (and mostly very artificial interpretations)
of Old Testament texts the one side striving to
show that the Messiah was come in the person of
Jesus, the other side using just the same means
and methods and materials to show that the Messiah
had not come. But never a trace do we find of a
Jewish work written in the spirit of Eisenmenger
with the specific object of rendering odious a religion
and all who believe in it. You will agree that this
is remarkable. It may be that Jews have wished to
write such works, but feared for the consequences ; but
we have no right to take such a thing for granted. 160
The Jews preferred, on the whole, to remain dumb.
If they did break their rule of protective dumbness
it was to point to something good in Christianity and
Christians.

A very famous Talmudist and controversialist of
the middle of the eighteenth century was Jacob
Emden. This is what he finds himself able to say
of Christianity :

" Christianity has been given as part of the
Jewish religion by the Apostles to the Gentile world ;
and its Founder has even made the moral laws
stricter than are those contained in the Mosaic
law. There are, accordingly, many Christians of
high qualities and excellent morals who keep from
hatred and do harm to none, even to their enemies.

60 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

Would that Christians would all live in conformity
with their precepts ! They are not enjoined, like the
Israelites, to observe the laws of Moses; nor do they
sin if they associate other beings with God in wor-
shipping a trinitarian Godhead. They will receive
reward from God for having propagated a belief in
Him among nations that never heard His name ; for
' He looks into the heart.' Yea, many Christians
have even gone forth to the rescue of Jews and their
literature." 17

This is, indeed, a valuable testimony. It is a
tribute to the growth of a truer, Christ-like Chris-
tianity within the Church, a great tribute to the
. fearless work done by the few Christian leaders and
rank and file who dared to fight down the age-long
instinct which led Christians of all ages to loathe,
despise and, wherever possible, harass and persecute
the Jew; but it is, still more, a tribute to the
great-mindedness of this Jew who was able to some
extent to penetrate through the thick wall of intoler-
ance and cruelty, savagery and barbarity which had
interposed between the Church and Judaism.

We referred earlier to the " Golden Age " of the
Jews in Spain. It was towards the close of that
period that there took place some of the famous
public disputations, staged by the rulers of the
country between Christians and Jews, to argue the
rival merits of the two religions. In one of these
disputations we first hear of the story of the rings,
found later in Boccaccio and used again with great
effect by Lessing in his Nathan ike Wise. 18 This is
the story as it was first told by a Jew :

THE CRUSADES 61

" In ancient days there lived a man who
possessed a ring of gold beyond all price. It
had within it a hidden virtue. It made him
who wore it beloved of God and man. This
man had two sons. He promised them that
when he died he would give the ring to that
one of his sons whom he loved best, and that
son, by virtue of possessing the ring, should
inherit all his father's goods. But he loved
both his sons equally dearly. What then did
he do ? He called a skilful goldsmith who made
a second ring so like the first that none could
see a difference. On his death-bed the father
gave a ring to each of his sons. What hap-
pened? Each claimed the father's estate.
Each, knowing his father's love for himself,
believed the other's ring to be false. They
brought their case before the judge, ' I/ said
the judge, ' cannot solve this riddle. Your father
alone knew which of you he loved best ; and he
is not here to testify before me. This do.
Each of you go your way, wear your ring;
strive in all things to make yourselves beloved
of God and man the virtue which the true
ring gives. Pass on the ring with the virtues
which it claims to your children's children.
Then, after a thousand thousand years, appear
again before this judgment seat. A greater
one than I shall then sit upon it. He shall
decide between you.' "

IV
IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

IN the three earlier lectures we have had glimpses
of Christian- Jewish relations at characteristic times,
in various centuries and in various parts of the world,
and we have learnt the consequent Jewish senti-
ments about Christianity. To the Jews, Christianity,
whenever it rose to activity, was too often an evil
dream experienced in fact. To murder Jews even
became a laudable Christian practice; to hate the
Jew became a Christian virtue. Nothing, no matter
how bad it is, that may be found in Jewish ideas
about Christianity need surprise us : Jews had no
reason to think otherwise than that Christian
leadership spelled intolerance and cruelty, while the
outstanding Christian virtue cultivated by the multi-
tude seemed to be savage barbarity towards the
Jew. That many thoughtful Jews did, in fact,
penetrate through this thorn-hedge raised by the
Christians, and found something of good in Chris-
tianity that is a tribute rather to Jewish intelli-
gence than to Christian practice.

Coming to the nineteenth century, there is a radical
change to be noticed. This change is a complicated
one. To understand it rightly we must realize the
external factors which brought it about.

62

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 63

I. The first factor is this. The end of the eighteenth
century saw the Jews at a low ebb politically and at
an even lower ebb culturally. In the Middle Ages,
and for long after, compared with the Christians the
Jews were an educated people : with them, at least
among their men-folk, literacy was the rule, and not
as with Christians, the exception. In their con-
troversies with Christians, and especially in their
private dealings with Christians, the Jews must
always have cherished a conviction of their own
superiority ; that they had not the tact to hide this
feeling may, to some extent, explain Christian
exasperation against them.

With the dawn of the nineteenth century the con-
ditions were reversed. It was the Jews now who
were examples of ignorance and superstition, and it
was the Christians who had the monopoly of learn-
ing who were hurrying forward and taking advan-
tage of all the new developments in science and
learning. Before, while suffering under political
oppression, the Jew could always comfort himself by
a feeling of his own moral and intellectual super-
iority. By the beginning of the nineteenth century
he had quite lost this superiority. More and more
the Jews had been cut off from the world : they
were either confined to the ghettoes in the big towns
of Western Europe, or segregated in towns and
villages in Eastern Europe, where they became
stagnant both intellectually and economically.
Whenever any of them had the courage to look out
from the narrow confines of their petty community
life, it was to see a Christian world which, in material

64 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

and intellectual progress, left the Jew by comparison
in the discomfort and obscurity of the Middle Ages.
The Jews could only cultivate their old feeling of
superiority by keeping their eyes rigidly turned
inwards. Out of this lethargy the Jews, or some of
them, were vigorously shaken by Moses Mendelssohn
(the grandfather of Mendelssohn the musician). 1 By
introducing his fellow- Jews to the German language
and literature, Mendelssohn first showed them their
defects and gave them the key to the totally new and
strange territory of Western learning and thought.

II. The second factor in the changing situation
was the gradual acquiring by the Jews in Western
Europe of political rights. It was the era of " eman-
cipation," freedom in the political, educational,
social and religious sense. The ideals which had
found an outlet in the American and French revolu-
tions continued to work, and one effect of them was
the removal of the political disabilities of Jews in
France, Germany, England, Italy and some other
parts of Europe.

This all led to a gradual change in Jewish life and
mental habits. Formerly the Jew had the alterna-
tive either of leading a harassed, embittered, though
sometimes profitable life in Christian surroundings,
or of persuading himself that his own ghetto Jewish
life, bound and hemmed in by the Talmud rules,
was a higher, an all-sufficient life. Some there were,
some there are still, convinced that this second is the
true and altogether satisfying ideal for the Jew. But
with the early decades of the nineteenth century the
Jew was no longer compelled to lead the stunted life

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 65

of a social outcast in Christian circles, or reduced to
persuading himself that life within the four walls of
the Talmud was the ideal Jewish life. All life, learn-
ing and work now lay before him.

But now he was not, as in the Middle Ages, the
teacher, the leader in civilization : he was a mere
learner, a beginner.

III. The third factor to bring about a change in
Jewish-Christian relations was a movement within
Judaism the so-called " Reform Judaism."

In its beginnings reform in Judaism, though
obviously influenced by a reformed-Christianity
environment, was not primarily moved by the
principle called up by the Protestant Reforma-
tion in Christian history the clearing away of
centuries of practice and tradition in order to
return to a simpler and supposedly purer form of the
faith. The primary object in Jewish reform, the
main object of its first promoters, was to fit Jews to
take a part in the wider world that had opened around
them in consequence of the removal of most political
disabilities. Thus, first and foremost, the tradi-
tional laws must be relaxed which forbade Jews to
have anything to do with the culture of the age or
hindered them from taking the fullest share in the
social and national activities, responsibilities and
opportunities of the live world around them. A
new interest was taken in the idea of Judaism as
a religion (as opposed to a complex, hemmed-in
life) ; stress came to be laid upon the orderliness
and seemliness of divine worship following the
model of Christian Protestant Churches, synagogue

66 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

services were shortened, sermons and hymns
were introduced in the vernacular, and much of
the service itself was conducted in the everyday
speech, instead of the rarely understood Hebrew.
Subsequently far-reaching changes were introduced
into the actual contents of Judaism. The Talmud
and the Shulchan Arukh (the compendium of rules
governing daily life, derived from the Talmud),
though honoured as Jewish tradition, were no longer
regarded as absolutely binding.

It is impossible to discuss all the stages of Reform
Judaism. The gist of the matter is simply this :
whereas the traditional orthodox Judaism claims to
control the whole of a Jew his nationality, his every
habit, his secular thoughts and outlook, his family
life, in fact his whole attitude to life Reform
Judaism, on the other hand, pleads that the " Juda-
ism " of a Jew should affect only his religious life.
There are degrees of Reform Judaism, from the
comparatively conservative to the extreme left wing
of liberalism ; but they all agree in this, that " Juda-
ism " is not to be bound up with Jewish nationality
or culture : it is a religion only.

Such are the three factors dominating the change
in Jewish-Christian relations in the nineteenth
century : the Jew's realization of his cultural in-
feriority, his acquisition of political and social rights,
and the stirrings of the Reform Judaism idea.

What were the results ? They may be reduced in
number to two : one intangible, the other most
tangible.

The first is this. The more a person is conscious
of his own imperfections the less likely is he to brood

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 67

overmuch upon the real, or supposed, imperfections
in others; also, consciousness of one's own defects
leads automatically to the recognition of others'
merits. For eighteen centuries Christianity had
used its physical superiority to crush Judaism :
scarcely ever do we find it striving first and foremost
to impress the moral beauty of Christianity upon the
Jews. Therefore no blame attaches to the Jews if
they failed to see any moral beauty in Christianity.
But the Christian's appetite for persecution (at least
throughout much of the world) ended with the dawn
of the nineteenth century. The Jew, in most of
Europe and in America, found himself accepted as a
human brother and a fellow-citizen. He was free
and highly willing to take what he wanted of the
Christian civilization around him; and he was ex-
tremely quick to adapt himself to it. He was able to
shed his protective crust of Jewish customs and anti-
Christian prejudices. There even arose generations
of Jews ignorant of the anti-Christian weapon forged
by their fathers of old the cherished idea that
Christianity was a fiction based on shameless lies.
They were willing to admit that Christianity was a
movement of service to the world.

The second result is this. In itself it is a develop-
ment grievously humiliating to Christians. But it is
one for which Christians must feel a measure of
gratitude. No longer did the Jews rest content to
base their conclusions about Christianity on Chris-
tians. They had the good taste to forget, so far as
they possibly could, the terrible scourge that Chris-
tianity had been to them in the past to forget the
acts of Christendom and to think rather of its ideals.

68 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

In short they turned their faces away from Christians
and gave their attention to the person of the Founder
of Christianity. This is humiliating to Christians,
but we cannot say that the humiliation is un-
deserved.

I speak now, of course, only of those Jews who
troubled their heads about the subject at all : the
mass of the Jews never did. Orthodox Jewry has
tried its utmost to close its mind against the whole
subject of Christianity; though if the Jews lived (as
most of them still did) under the more harassed con-
ditions and in the unfriendly surroundings of Eastern
Europe in that case they could at need always find
combined comfort and vengeance by cherishing in
their heart of hearts the puerile mediaeval Jewish
fables about Christianity's origins. But their past
memories and their present ideas of Christianity,
and their ever-present dangers, convinced them that,
in the face of the outer world, silence and the closed
mind were their wisest policy.

But certain Jews there were who faced the subject
of Christianity as an essential part of the world of
thought in which they were at last permitted to
roam at large. In a sense they were compelled to
study the subject. They were influenced by the
Reform Movement : in other words, Judaism had
come with them to fulfil the duty of a religion only :
it must meet their spiritual requirements. But
though Judaism was to them no more than a religion,
it was the religion which they openly professed.
Therefore they must justify this preference, at least
to themselves. Judaism and Christianity sprang
from the same origins : they must closely resemble

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 69

each other. What prevented the Jews from going a
step further in their course of reform and accepting
that modification of Judaism contained in Chris-
tianity? They had to meet the challenge of such
men as the learned Christian Hebraist, Franz
Delitzsch, and prominent converts like Benjamin
Disraeli, who insisted that Christianity was Judaism
in a stage of higher and more cultivated development.

This period saw the conversion of large numbers
of Jews in Germany. We need not follow Jewish
writers who attribute these conversions one and all
to worldly motives and personal ambition. There
may have been such; but it is more reasonable to
see the great movement of conversion in the nine-
teenth century as an outcome of the factors we have
seen at work. Many of the Jews were at last able to
see Christianity- through glasses no longer smeared
by the mud and fog of former Christian treatment of
them; and they no longer felt the straining of a
purely Jewish conscience or a purely racial bond
binding them tightly to their forefathers. All the
more then were the leaders of Jewish life compelled
to face the problem of Judaism's claim, as a religion,
to persist face to face with its daughter faith,
Christianity.

It is proposed to discuss briefly the work of six
prominent Jews who have dealt with the subject,
namely, Joseph Salvador, a French Jew of in-
dependent mind; Abraham Geiger, a leading figure
in the Reform Movement in Germany; Heinrich
Graetz, a strong opponent of the Reform Movement ;
Joseph Jacobs, an English Jew of the Westernized
orthodox type; Mr. Claude Montefiore, an English

70 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

Jew of the extreme Liberal camp ; and " Ahad ha-
Am," the philosopher of the Zionist Movement, and
one who is held in great veneration by thoughtful
Jews of to-day. These six represent almost every
variety of nineteenth and early twentieth-century
articulate Jewish opinion about Christianity. Their
ideas also underlie all present-day Jewish opinion as
well.

The first on our list, Joseph Salvador, 2 published
in Paris, in 1838, two volumes entitled Jesus Christ
and His Teaching : a History of the Birth of the
Church, its Organization and its Progress during the
First Century. He puts forward the idea which later
Jews have seized upon with such avidity and empha-
sized so strongly that Jesus never laid down any
ethical precepts which did not already exist in the
Old Testament or in the Judaism of the time. Thus
he claims to find the entire Sermon on the Mount
in the Book of Ecclesiasticus, in the Apocrypha. If
there was any difference between Jesus and the
Pharisees, the established teachers of the time, it
lay mainly in this : that whereas the Pharisees had
an eye for society as a whole, for reality, the possi-
bilities of human nature, the needs of the Jewish
nation as a nation, the claim of man's happiness in
this life, and what made for practical social reforms
Jesus, on the other hand, was concerned only
with the religious and ethical life of the individual.
The Pharisees looked to the preservation of the
Jewish national integrity, to save it from fading into
the surrounding nations, and being absorbed by
them ; the great aim of the Pharisees was to preserve
the distinctive national characteristics, social and

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 71

secular, as well as religious and ethical all of which
were combined in the Tomh, the divine Law given
to Israel. The social and ceremonial elements
served to protect and preserve the purely ethical
and religious elements till the time should at last
come when, through Israel's enlightened example and
teaching, redemption should come to the whole
world. Jesus, on the other hand, thought only of
the religious and moral life of the individual; He
thought nothing of the national Jewish needs, nor
was it a matter of importance to Him whether the
Jewish nation survived at all.

Salvador tried to show that Christianity was a
compromise between Judaism and paganism, a com-
promise which had proved necessary in order to
persuade the pagan world to accept Jewish ethical
and religious teaching. Judaism, however, remained
free from any such taint or admixture.

Although Salvador wrote nearly a hundred years
ago, his arguments are still the mainstay of Jewish
apologetics to-day. He anticipated most of the ideas
which we shall find in his successors. At the time
the book made a sensation in French Christian
circles, but it was soon forgotten and exerted no
direct influence on Jewish thought of the time.

Abraham Geiger was a learned Rabbi, one of the
greatest figures among the Jews of Germany in the
middle of the nineteenth century. In 1864 he pub-
lished three lectures dealing with Jesus and His
early disciples. 3 Geiger reduced the origin of
Christianity to very mean proportions. He main-
tained that Jesus put forward no new idea of any
kind, nor did His thoughts ever wander beyond the

72 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

range of His own people. Jesus did not teach any-
thing contrary to the general principles already main-
tained by the Pharisees; like the rest of the Jews
of those days he believed in the coming of a Messiah,
with whom were bound up the hopes of deliverance
from the tyranny of Rome. Jesus kept the cere-
monial laws like every loyal Jew, but occasionally
He belittled this or that observance if He thought it
a hindrance rather than a help. But He never
dreamed of putting an end to such laws on principle
as did St. Paul. Jesus praised the life of poverty
and He taught a contempt of this world, and He
disliked sharing this world's pleasures. But this was
no opposition to Jewish teaching of the time ; it was
simply a frame of mind due to the depressed econo-
mical conditions of the Jews under Roman oppression.

Faced by the obvious problem : How could Chris-
tianity have arisen if Jesus taught no new idea?
Geiger thought it could be solved by supposing that
Jesus' disciples believed that He was the Messiah,
that they still believed this after He was killed, and
from day to day looked forward to His return in
glory, and felt the spiritual conviction that Jesus had
risen again and would appear a second time.

That, Geiger thought, was all that there could
possibly be known about the real historical origins
of Christianity ; and he thought that these things in
themselves accounted for Christianity.

His conclusion as to the rival merits of Christianity
and Judaism was that Christianity was a weakened,
enervated form of Judaism, arising out of Judaism
at a time when Judaism was passing through a
sickly, enervated period. Christianity, this en-

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 73

feebled Judaism, only survived through its super-
structure of belief about the second coming of Jesus.
Judaism, on the other hand, had survived through
the centuries of persecution, thereby proving its
strength. Geiger saw it as a still developing plant
destined to bring the ideals of universal justice before
the world. He did not believe, with older orthodox
Judaism, that the Talmud was the last word in the
story of Judaism. He was not an extreme reformer
(from the standpoint of modern Reform Judaism),
but he hoped that a gradual process of evolution
would enable the Jews to shed a great deal that was
petrified and worthless in their lives and traditions.

It is, however, Heinrich Graetz 4 (d. 1894) who
has done more than any other Jewish writer to instil
into the ordinary average, Western Jew a working
hypothesis of Christianity, not too difficult to under-
stand, and one that preserved the self-respect of
Jews. He was a violent opponent of the Reform
Judaism movement. He admired his nation's tradi-
tions and gloried in his Jewishness. He was an
industrious and widely read student. He had an
independent mind. But chiefly he was possessed of
powers of highly impassioned rhetoric. With these
qualifications he wrote a History of the Jews from
the earliest times till 1848. It is a great work. It
is immensely popular in spite of its bulk. Most
Jews consider it as authoritative and the last word
on the subject. Its ideas have penetrated deeply
into" the consciousness of all Western Jews with any
pretence to a modern education, be they orthodox
or reformed, liberal or conservative.

Unfortunately it is long odds that if a so-called

74 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

" History " wins immense popularity, it cannot be
very good history. So it is with Graetz. It is
written with a passionate love and enthusiasm for
his people; hence its popularity. It is a lyrical
account of the wanderings and sufferings of the Jews
down through the centuries; but good history it
certainly is not. It knows only two principles if
you dislike anything, condemn it wholly; if you
admire anything, then it is altogether praiseworthy.
This makes popular reading but bad history.

Graetz gives careful attention to the rise of Chris-
tianity ; and, of course, in the later portions of Jewish
history the Christian world is constantly on the
scene. Throughout (and we cannot be surprised
and we have little right to protest) Christian treat-
ment of Jews comes in for the bitterest comment.
The persecutions in country after country, in century
after century, are told in most lurid detail, with
passionate sympathy for the suffering race. (The
Christian should bear in mind that these accounts, as
retold by Graetz, have entered into the flesh and
blood of the Jew of to-day and become in a sense
a part of his national and religious consciousness.)
The astonishing part of Graetz's " History " is his
treatment of the life of our Lord. Normally Graetz
was the servant and the victim of most violent pre-
judices. The Kabbalah, the eighteenth-century Hasi-
dic Movement, the Reform Movement, Christianity
throughout the ages, Jewish converts to Christianity
all these are treated with trenchant, scornful,
scurrilous, venomous and, at times, libellous ani-
mosity. We turn to the account of Jesus. The
Christian has to confess to surprise, and humilia-

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 75

tion. There is no bitterness in Graetz's portrayal of
Jesus. These following words of Graetz might easily
have been written about our Lord by a devoted
Christian : " High-minded earnestness and spotless
moral purity were his undeniable attributes : they
stand out in all the authentic accounts of his life.
. . . Jesus looked upon the promotion of peace and
the forgiveness of injuries as the highest form of
virtue. His whole being was permeated by that
deeper religion which consecrates to God not only
the hour of prayer, a day of penitence . . . but every
step in the journey of life, which turns every aspira-
tion of the soul towards God, subjects everything to
His will, and with childlike trust commits every-
thing to His keeping." 4a

For the rest, Graetz follows much the same lines
as Salvador and Geiger in confining Jesus to the
narrow limits of a purely Jewish framework. Graetz
attempted to account for any peculiarities in Jesus,
as well as in John the Baptist, by supposing that
they were both connected with the Essene com-
munity those Jewish ascetics living a monastic
life away from civilization down in the Dead Sea
plain. It is characteristic of Graetz, Geiger, Sal-
vador, and most Jewish writers who have followed
in their train, that they feel it their first and most
bounden duty to deprive the Gospels of any semblance
of originality.

Graetz gave his fellow- Jews the blackest possible
picture of Christianity from the time of St. Paul
onwards, a picture which is the reflection of Chris-
tianity's treatment of the Jews; but of Jesus, our
Lord Himself, the picture is that of one who fulfilled

76 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

an ideal of Jewish piety. Graetz, it may be pointed
out, utterly refused to accept the mediaeval blas-
phemous stories of Jesus as representing Jewish
opinion of any worth ; also he pays no attention to
the real or supposed Talmud references.

We come now to the English Jew, Joseph Jacobs.
He is chosen here not because he is important as the
originator of a new phase, but because he is repre-
sentative of educated, more or less sophisticated
orthodox Judaism, tending towards conservative
Reform, at the end of last century. In 1895 he
published anonymously a little book entitled As
Others saw Him. It belongs to the familiar type- of
fictitious lives of our Lord, attempting to retell the
Gospel story as seen through the eyes of an indepen-
dent contemporary in this case an Alexandrian
Jew imagined as having been present in Jerusalem
during our Lord's ministry there. The author makes
quite a charming story of it. He depicts Jesus as a
compelling, attractive, winning character ; he retells
the episodes of the Rich Young Man, the Woman
taken in Adultery, and Jesus' teaching as to what
is the greatest commandment. Material is drawn
from other sources, but not out of keeping with the
rest of the picture. Indirectly the author intro-
duces the aim of his book : to explain why the Jews
refused to accept Jesus. He hails Jesus as
thoroughly Jewish, one who observed all the cere-
monial laws; as a true Jew He looked on God as
His heavenly Father, He had compassion on the
poor, helped the fallen, rated the repentant higher
than the scrupulously pious. He even had the
national defects of the Jew : He never noticed

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 77

what was beautiful in nature, never smiled; He
taught by tears, threats and scoldings. In all this
Jesus was most Jewish of Jews. But in two respects
He was wholly strange to them. He did not teach
as a messenger sent from God, but taught His own
views on His own authority; secondly, He lacked
Jewish patriotic feelings. It was this last which
finally turned the Jews from Him. Thus a character
in the story is made to say : " He evaded our ques-
tionings and eluded our testings. He seemed aloof
from us and our desires. All Israel was pining to
be freed from the Roman yoke, and he would have
us pay tribute for ever. . . . Jesus died ... for
that he cared naught for our national hopes. We
were all panting for national freedom; he would
have naught of it. Whether it was that he felt in
some sort to be not of our nation, I know not ; but
in all his teaching he dealt with us as men, not as
Jews." " He had spent his life in trying to impress
a new ideal upon his people, and they had welcomed
him only as the fulfilment of the old ideal which he
would have replaced."

We shall hear more of this " unpatriotism " of
Jesus in the course of the next lecture.

In passing, reference may be made to the great
twelve-volume Jewish Encyclopedia published in
America during the early years of this century. It
can be taken as giving the standard ideas of modern,
conservative Reform as well as Westernized Orthodox
Judaism. So far as it touches on the subjects of
Christianity and our Lord it does not add any ideas
beyond those we have already heard. The attitude
on the whole is one of friendly but critical neutrality.

78 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

The same Joseph Jacobs, just discussed, was one of
the Board of Editors, and the same ideas found in
his book, As Others saw Him, recur from time to time
throughout the Encyclopedia. The actual article on
" Jesus " is by the late Kaufmann Kohler. He finds
himself able to speak thus of his subject :

" A great historic movement of the character and
importance of Christianity cannot have arisen with-
out a great personality to call it into existence and
to give it shape and direction. Jesus of Nazareth
had a mission from God ; and he must have had the
spiritual powers and fitness to be chosen for it."

This veneration of the figure of Jesus must not,
however, be taken as typical of Westernized Jewry.
Hostility to Christianity and its Founder, stifled or
only masked by the age-long habit of the closed mind,
still persists to a very great extent among ordinary
Western Jews. To these people, in the first decade
of this century, it came as a great relief to hear that
Jesus had " never really existed at all." This con-
soling fact they learned on the authority of a German
called Drews, an Englishman called Robertson and
an American called Smith. 4&

This theory has become extremely popular
among Jews. They now argue that since " they "
that is, non-Jews, therefore Christians have them-
selves declared Jesus to be a myth, then those
troublesome problems of Christianity, Jesus and
Judaism, can be regarded by all sensible people as
permanently shelved.

But to return to the six representatives on our
list.

Mr. Claude Montefiore is a leader of the liberal

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 79

camp in Judaism, the extreme left wing of Reform
Judaism. The characteristic of this party is its
claim to choose, out of the historic content of Juda-
ism, only those elements which appeal to their judg-
ment as worth preserving in the light of modern
thought and knowledge. They correspond very
closely to the " Modernists " in the Church of
England, and they are just as hotly attacked by the
older orthodoxy. Therefore, however interesting
their views may be as coming from a Jewish source,
they must on no account be supposed to be in any
sense typically Jewish.

This is what Mr. Montefiore, as long ago as 1894,
wrote of Jesus :

" The most important Jew who ever lived, one who
exercised a greater influence upon mankind and
civilization than any other person, whether within
the Jewish race or without it. ... A Jew whose
life and character have been regarded by almost all
the best and wisest people who have heard or read
of his actions and his words, as the greatest religious
exemplar of every age." 5

In 1910 Mr. Montefiore writes :

" God's nearness was felt by Jesus directly with a
vivid intensity unsurpassed by any man." 6 " Jesus
differs from, or, as some would say, goes beyond the
prophets : ' More than a prophet is here/ " 7

We have seen how, since the time of Joseph
Salvador, Jews have proclaimed loudly that the
Gospels, in their religious and ethical teaching, give
nothing more than what Judaism already possessed.
This is what Mr. Montefiore has to say on this point :

" To each individual striking utterance of Jesus

8o THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

it is likely enough that a good parallel can be found
in the Rabbinic literature; but when Jewish
scholars adopt this method of disproving the origin-
ality of the Gospels, they forget (quite apart from
questions of date) the size of the Talmud and the
Midrashim " (these, it should be explained, amount
in quantity to something like half the bulk of the
Encyclopedia Britannica, and were written at
various dates between the third and the thirteenth
centuries of our era). "The teaching of Jesus is
contained in three little books which do not fill
more than sixty-eight small pages of tolerably small
print. The teaching belongs or is attributed to one
man, and constitutes, in large measure, a consistent
and harmonious whole. It is not a combination
of a thousand different occasional and disconnected
sayings of a hundred different Rabbis. Again, as a
great scholar rather bitingly said, the greatness of
the Gospels as compared with the greatness of the
Talmud must be measured by what is not there as
well as by what is. (In the Gospels) we have not to
neglect a vast quantity of third- and fourth-rate
material, and seek for occasional pearls amid a mass
of negligible trivialities." 8
Elsewhere the same Jewish writer says :
" There is a certain spirit and glow about the
teaching of Jesus . . . you cannot recognize or do
justice to it by saying, ' The teaching of Jesus com-
prises the following maxims and injunctions; of
these some are borrowed from the Old Testament,
some are paralleled by the Talmud, and a few are
impracticable.' The teaching of Jesus, which has
had such gigantic effects upon the world,|is more

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 81

and other than a dissected list of injunctions. It is
not merely the sum of its parts : it is a whole, a
spirit." 9

The last of the six representatives to be considered
is " Ahad ha-Am."

Ahad ha- Am, " One of the people " (the pen-name
of Mr. Asher Ginzberg), is a modern Jew who has
done much hard thinking in order to find for his
people a reasonable and fitting place in the scheme of
the universe. All along, in season and out of season,
he has endeavoured to persuade his fellow- Jews that
they have something, as Jews, in their history, their
traditions, their culture, their religion, their men-
tality, worthy of preservation. With Theodor
Herzl, the idea of Zionism began as an attempt to
command justice and consideration for Jews by
making a nation of them in the political sense.
With Ahad-ha-Am, the root-principle of Zionism is
rather an attempt to create in Palestine a spiritual
centre in which any and every form of specifically
Jewish art, life, thought or activity could work out
its own salvation, free from all things un- Jewish;
from this spiritual centre it is hoped that Jewish
inspiration may go forth to the Jews the world
over; and that even the Gentiles may once again
feel themselves impelled to listen to glad tidings
from Jerusalem.

The attitude towards Christianity of liberal and
Reform Jews like Mr. Montefiore aroused fierce indig-
nation and antagonism in Ahad ha- Am; and quite
naturally. His great ideal was to find the essence of
Judaism and grasp it tightly and at all costs avoid
the entanglements of rival attractions. His diagnosis

82 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

of Mr. Montefiore, and those who thought like him,
was not that they merely showed an innocent Jewish
appreciation of Christianity, but that they were
ceasing to be Jewish and were already half assimil-
ated to Christianity. Ahad ha-Am insisted that
while Christianity was all very well for Christians,
Jews could have nothing to do with it short of deny-
ing the three most fundamental characteristics, of
Judaism. According to Ahad ha-Am these are :
(i) Judaism puts the good of society first : Chris-
tianity cares only for the individual ; (2) Judaism
cannot suffer any kind of religious veneration
directed towards any human tangible personality;
and (3) the ethical basis of Judaism is absolute
justice, whereas in Christianity the ethical principle is
confused by compromise with asceticism.

I should like to give long extracts from the essay
in which Ahad ha-Am works out his ideas about
Judaism and Christianity; but it would take too
long. Those who are interested can easily secure it.
It has been translated by Mr. Leon Simon. 10 To the
Christian mind, the three points made by Ahad ha-Am
are curious and important. They will make most
Christians rejoice in the fact that they are Christians.

As for the first point, normal humanity needs a
religion which takes first thought for the frailty and
needs of the individual : society can be trusted to
work out its own salvation, once the needs of the
individual are granted. A League of Nations will
never make good men : it needs good men to make
a League of Nations. Again, with regard to Ahad
ha-Am's second point, the Christian, equally with the
Jew, will always resist the crime of making God in

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 83

the image of man; but divine revelation to man
there must be : for the Jews it has been the revela-
tion from Sinai taking the form of a code of law;
for the Christian the revelation has taken the form
of a Person a Person who lived and who died (so
the Christian believes) in perfect accord with the will
of God.

But it is the third point which will give the Chris-
tian the greatest shock. Ahad ha-Am tries to show
that, ethically, Judaism represents absolute justice;
while Christianity stands for asceticism and com-
promise. This, translated into simple Christian
language, means : Jewish morality is based on right-
eousness, Christian morality is based on love. This,
of course, we always knew that the God of the
Hebrew prophets was a God of righteousness, whereas
the Christian revelation emphasized the fact (not
altogether ignored in the Hebrew Prophets) that
God is a God of love, mercy and compassion as well.

But Ahad ha-Am would have us understand the
consequences : he shows us the deep line of cleavage
which the difference makes between the ethical
principles of Judaism and those of Christianity.

The Christian " golden rule " is, " Do unto others
what you would that men should do unto you."
Judaism has the same, or what seems to be the same
rule in the negative form : " What is hateful to thy-
self, do not unto thy neighbour." And Ahad ha-Am
believes that in these two forms lies the ethical
difference in the two religions* : egotism is the mark

* Yet no less an authority than Maimonid.es holds both forms
as truly representative of Jewish ethics. See his Seftr ka-
Mitzvdth : Mitzvoth 'Aseh, 206.

84 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

of Jewish ethics ; but Christian altruism, he insists,
is merely inverted egotism, the substitution of other
for self.

Ahad ha-Am is not content to leave the matter at
that. To make an apparently abstruse point clear
as daylight he quotes the following case from the
Talmud :

Imagine two men travelling in the desert; only
one of them has a bottle of water ; if both drink they
will both die before their journey's end ; if only one
drinks he will reach safety, but his companion will
certainly die. What should the man with the bottle
of water do ? Rabbi Akiba decided (and Ahad ha-Am
fully agrees that the decision counts as a funda-
mental principle of Jewish morality) R. Akiba
decided that the man with the water should keep it
and drink it all himself ; because if both of them could
not survive, it is more just, more in accord with
God's righteousness, that a man should save himself
rather than that he should save his neighbour and
so lose his own life. Other things being equal, says
Jewish morality, you have no right to assume that
your neighbour's affairs are of more worth in God's
eyes than your own affairs. Certainly Judaism
approves of the laying down of life to fulfil a religious
ideal (sanctification of the name of God, martyrdom) ;
but it condemns the man who will suppress himself
for the sake of his fellow. Christianity, on the con-
trary, teaches : " Greater love hath no man than
this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."

Ahad ha-Am maintains that this, the basic differ-
ence between Jewish and Christian ethics, shows the
superiority of Jewish ethics, in that it replaces the

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 85

illogical Christian doctrine of self-sacrifice, self-
renunciation, by the absolute rule of justice. There
we must be content to leave it.

To sum up. The nineteenth century sees the Jews
examining for themselves the Person and teaching of
our Lord. They refuse to learn about Christ from
Christians. Of this we dare not complain. The
Christians have themselves alone to blame if the
Jews failed to see Christ reflected in the lives of
Christians. The Jews have studied the Person and
teaching of our Lord. They have reached certain
conclusions. As Christians we know their conclu-
sions to be imperfect, their picture of Jesus to be
colourless and fragmentary. It is only Christians
who can experience Christ to the full. But Chris-
tians, in the eyes of Jews, have forfeited the right
to be interpreters of Jesus. There we have the
terrible tragedy of Christian Jewish relations. One
way only lies open : that is, for the Christian to
convince the Jew that he, the Christian, does indeed,
know Jesus, has indeed learnt to follow Jesus, does
indeed model his life on the pattern of Jesus, his
Saviour and Redeemer, and does indeed rank
humility, love of his fellow-men, and forgiveness and
forbearance as the indelible marks of the Christian
life and character. Then, and not till then, have
we the right to expect that Jews will be prepared to
listen to a Christian interpretation of Jesus as Christ
and Redeemer.

AT THE PRESENT TIME

IN the last lecture we saw the change which the
nineteenth century brought about in the Jewish
attitude towards Christianity. It would be wrong
to describe it as, in general, a change for the better :
such change as there was, was nothing more than a
modification in the frame of mind of articulate,
vocal, educated, Westernized or half- Westernized
Jewry only : the majority of the Jews, far removed
or removing themselves from any chance of social
or intellectual intercourse with Christians, were
either ignorant of Christianity, or despised it, or
deliberately ignored it, closing their minds to it as
to a thing which had meant for them only grievous
harm, sorrow and loss in the past, and even still was
an ever-present threat to them in their daily sur-
roundings.

I have said nothing of the persecutions which
befell the Jews of Russia and East Europe during the
nineteenth century. They are well enough known :
they have made the Russian words " pogrom " and
" hooligan " familiar in the English language.
These persecutions were not essentially religious
persecutions carried out in the name of Christianity :

86

THE PRESENT TIME 87

they often had quite other motives racial or econo-
mic; but always the same old, inbred, instinctive
dislike of the Jew, instilled into Christians by
centuries of a Christianity which cultivated this
hatred as a substitute for a Christian virtue, or even
as a Christian virtue in itself this same dislike was
always invoked and utilized by every pogrom-
monger ; and it was natural that the Jew should see
in all such social eruptions nothing more than
repetitions of the same old crimes, Christian anti-
Jewish crimes, with which his past history was so
thickly bespread.

But even this lamentable condition of things
brought about some good. Jews of Eastern Europe
emigrated in ever greater numbers first over the
Russian frontiers to Western Europe, and then
overseas to America. There, their Jewishness
proved, if a drawback at all, only a comparative
drawback :/they experienced a Christian civilization
in which such Christianity as was cultivated aimed
in the main not at expressing itself by Jew-hatred,
but by an ideal of life which neither Jew nor un-
believer could deny was a noble ideal. The nature
of this Christian ideal naturally became a source of
interest to thoughtful Jews. With much of it they
could sympathize ; by much of it they were repelled.
The " Christ of dogma " or, as Christians would
insist, the Jesus of Christian experience Him the
Jewish mind could not appreciate. But the Jesus
of the Gospels, Jesus reduced by the rationalizing
processes fashionable at the moment, Jesus reduced
to the size and figure of a Jewish teacher of the first
century such a Jesus the Jews could approach with

THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

interest and, they would claim, with understanding
also.

Such was the Jewish attitude towards Christianity
which developed in certain sections of Jewry in the
nineteenth century ; and it is such an attitude which
is typical of to-day. In Christian eyes this Jewish
attitude is vitiated in that it ignores the entire body
of Christian interpretation and experience. But
then, for reasons which are more plain to Jews than
pardonable in Christians, the Jews refuse to accept
the credentials of Christians as the only true ambas-
sadors of the Jesus of the Gospels.

In the preceding lecture we reviewed the most
representative expressions of articulate Jewish opinion
to which this new attitude had given rise. They
varied between a lowest degree of appreciation, which
looks upon Jesus as the teacher and exemplar of an
enfeebled Judaism, offered to the world by His
followers with a more or less pronounced veneer of
paganism; they vary between this lowest degree
and a highest degree of appreciation (that of the
Liberal camp in Judaism) which deems Jesus to have
taught what was best in Judaism ; by choosing with
inspired wisdom what was finest and by rejecting
the dross and the non-essentials, Jesus showed
Himself one of the greatest, if not the greatest
Jewish religious genius of all time, one whose
beneficial influence throughout the world none can
dispute.

In other words, there is a minimum Jewish
appreciation of our Lord which holds that by
" watering down " Judaism, Jesus and His followers
made it a religion more easy of acceptance by the

THE PRESENT TIME 89

pagan world; and there is a maximum Jewish
appreciation which holds that by freeing Judaism
of what was merely national and sectarian, Jesus
enabled the best that was in Judaism to become a
world-possession.

I propose to bring this series of lectures to an end
by describing the most recent Jewish attempt to
appraise the Person and teaching of our Lord,
namely, Dr. Joseph Klausner's Jesus of Nazareth :
his Times, his Life and his Teaching ; and by
indicating the kind of reception which this book has
met with in various Jewish circles.

By some Jews the book has been looked upon as a
startling and dangerous monstrosity; by others as
a welcome novelty. Actually we shall see that in
only a few points does it at all overstep the well-
defined channels of Jewish opinion in the recent or
remote past. It is best described as a book which
gathers together the many loose and floating ends
of Jewish thought, and anchors them, stabilizes them,
or even stereotypes them for a generation or more
very much, for example, as Graetz in his History
of the Jews, by his treatment of Jesus and Christianity,
acted as a fixative of Jewish thought on the subject
for more than half a century.

It is important to give a few details of the author
himself ; for the book, above all things, is an honest
and sincere book. Therefore it never, so to speak,
oversteps the limits of the personality and experience
of its author.

Dr. Joseph Klausner has a great and well-earned
reputation as writer, historian, thinker and leader of
thought in those Jewish circles mainly concerned

go THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

with the present Hebrew cultural revival, commonly
called Zionism. His whole life and energies have
been devoted to this revival ; and it is characteristic
of him, and the many like him, that though an
accomplished writer in German and Russian, he has
refused for many years to publish anything except
in Hebrew, or even to speak publicly except in
Hebrew, although this condemns him to a very
limited body of readers and a very local fame.

He was born in a small town in Lithuanian Russia
in 1874. All his life (except for an interval at a
German University) he has lived in an exclusively
Jewish environment and Jewish atmosphere of
thought. This fact should not be forgotten. Till
his fourteenth year he was educated along lines that
were becoming usual among broader-minded Jews
combining the best results of the old-fashioned
concentration on Talmud and Rabbinic studies with
a modicum of subjects contained in an ordinary
secular education. Subsequent years, lived in
Odessa, provided him with the more conventional
Western education, except that, Jew-like, he
absorbed a multiplicity of languages, ancient and
modern.

When he was sixteen years of age he became an
enthusiastic follower of the movement for reviving
Hebrew as a spoken language. Soon afterwards he
became a sworn friend and follower of Ahad ha- Am,
Mr. Asher Ginzberg, the philosopher of the Zionist
Movement, and mouthpiece of that variety of Zion-
ism which would concentrate on making Palestine
the spiritual centre of world- Jewry rather than
merely a material or political Jewish centre. He

THE PRESENT TIME 91

began to publish articles in the Hebrew Press on the
subject of the Hebrew language revival, and in his
early twenties acquired the hall-mark of the Hebrew
writer the honour of writing in Ha-Shiloach, a
monthly Hebrew journal then edited by Ahad
ha-Am. In 1897 he entered the University of
Heidelberg, where he studied philosophy and
Semitic languages. He took his degree of Doctor
of Philosophy in 1902, with the thesis Jewish
Messianic Ideas in the First and Second Centuries.
This was published in 1904 and has become the
standard work on the subject. Shortly afterwards
Dr. Klausner became the editor of Ha-Shiloach,
and he has edited it ever since.

In 1907 he was appointed lecturer of History
in the Hebrew Seminary at Odessa. He came to
Palestine in 1920 and at once took a dominating
position in the new Hebrew life of the " Jewish
National Home," both as writer and public worker.

He has a long list of books to his credit on several
subjects. But the bulk of his labours has been
devoted to the history of the Jews, particularly to
that period, the years preceding and following the
birth of our Lord, from the rise of the Maccabees to
the fall of Jerusalem. He has, further, written
several volumes on the Messianic idea as it was
developed among the Jews. Of kindred, but wider
scope are his two books Judaism and Humanity and
Early Ethical Ideas among the Jews.

It is, therefore, obvious that Dr. Klausner's
intellectual life has focussed itself very directly on
to the period when our Lord lived on earth, and on
the Jewish ideas of the Messiah which our Lord came

92 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

to fulfil. So there is no gainsaying Dr. Klausner's
claims to publish a competent study of the figure of
Jesus from the point of view of Jewish history,
Jewish ideas of the Messiah, and Jewish ethics.
Such a work he published in 1922, in Hebrew of
course ; and he tells us that it is the result of work
carried on through the best part of his life.

The author explains that it is his object to give in
Hebrew for Hebrews an account of the Founder of
Christianity which shall be free of both Christian
and Jewish preconceptions, and so fill an obvious
gap in Jewish history, hitherto filled in only by
Christian historians. 1

First, to describe the book generally.

The early chapters are devoted to the sources on
which we are dependent for our knowledge of Jesus.
The author takes first the non-Christian sources,
Jewish and pagan. He deals with the references
in the Talmud and then with the stories contained
in the mediaeval Jewish fables about Jesus. These
he shows to be worthless as history, since they are,
essentially, deliberate depreciations or satirical
perversions of an already existing tradition ; all that
they can serve to prove is what the mediaeval Jews
thought about Christianity, and (in the case of the
early Talmud references) that the Gospel tradition
is traceable to an early date in the first century.
This is the first time in the Hebrew literature that a
Jew has seriously investigated these early and late
Jewish traditions on which the Jewish mind has
nourished itself for at least fifteen hundred years
and based its private, intimate conceptions of
Christianity's origins it is the first time in Hebrew

THE PRESENT TIME 93

that a Jewish, writer has investigated these traditions
and declared them to be worthless.

The book follows the beaten track in discussing
non- Jewish sources. A long section is devoted to a
history of the study of the Gospels themselves
that is to say, a history of this study as carried out
from the purely literary, documentary and historical
point of view the so-called " Higher Criticism " of
the Gospels, which works independently of the
traditional Christian and ecclesiastical ideas about
them, and tries to estimate them quite apart from
theological preconceptions. This is all familiar
ground to the ^Christian student, except for the
sections devoted by Dr. Klausner to the work of
Jewish students of the Gospels, work which has been
quite ignored by Christian scholars. As a result
of this study, Dr. Klausner arrives at much the same
conclusions as those accepted by the criticism
fashionable in Germany a generation ago.

A long section follows, virtually a third of the
entire book, on the period in which our Lord lived.
This is by far the best and most convincing account
that has yet been written of the historical, political,
cultural, religious and economic conditions into
which our Lord was born, and in which He lived and
worked and in which He died. Here, for the first
time, to the present writer's knowledge, we have
placed at our disposal, in correct perspective, all the
details of information that can be derived from
Jewish sources sources which hitherto have been
used for the purpose by Jewish writers uncritically
and without any historical sense of values, or by
Christian writers only superficially at second or

94 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

third hand, or ignored by Christian writers altogether.
These sources and the contemporary conditions are
here all reviewed with the one purpose of illuminating
the person and labour of Jesus.

Next comes a treatment, point by point, of the
events in our Lord's life. Here, again, what is said
and concluded covers matters familiar to Christian
students ; but, throughout, the author is constantly
drawing on his specialized knowledge of Jewish
sources of information, and, again and again, he
enables us to understand better many details in the
Gospels and to place them in their true proportion
and against their true Jewish background. It is
these details, and the full, expert treatment of the
period, which form a real contribution to know-
ledge and the permanent worth of the book. For
these, Christian students of the Gospels can feel
genuine gratitude to Dr. Klausner. For here it is
not a case of giving what is merely Jewish opinion
about Jesus and the Gospels, but of giving expert
Jewish help in a sphere where the Christian scholar
is generally inexpert and superficial.

What, however, has aroused the chief interest in
the book and provoked most opposition, is the final,
quite short section, dealing with the teaching of
Jesus. This teaching is dealt with under the
headings : " The Jewishness of Jesus," " Points
of opposition between Judaism and the teaching of
Jesus," " Jesus' idea of God," " The ethical teaching
of Jesus," " The Day of Judgment and the Kingdom
of Heaven," " The character of Jesus and the secret
of his influence," and, in conclusion, " What is Jesus
for the Jews ? "

THE PRESENT TIME 95

Throughout, the author is groping around to
try and find a convincing reason why it was that,
although Jesus was so completely Jewish, so com-
pletely a product of that time, and so clearly a great
influence which has transformed the world why was
it that the Jews as a whole, and the greatest minds
of the Judaism of that time why did they reject
Him?

Dr. Klausner satisfies himself (but will certainly
not satisfy Christian readers) that the reason, or
reasons, were these :

Our Lord's ethical system, His religious outlook,
were fundamentally Jewish. Yet He was so
immersed in the needs of the individual soul and so
overcome by despair of any good arising out of the
work-a-day world as He knew it, that He lost touch
with reality. Hence His insistence on self-abnega-
tion, forgiveness, self-sacrifice, the cultivation of a
degree of humility and self-suppression, such as, if
it were carried out in practice, would bring civiliz-
ation to an end. All these qualities, Dr. Klausner
urges, were taught by Judaism, but confined
within the limits of reason and practicability ;
whereas Jesus, in His ethical code, pushed these
Jewish principles to such an extreme as to
render them un- Jewish and beyond the capacities
of man, if he would continue in this ordinary
work-a-day world. Dr. Klausner believes that the
teachings of Jesus, if carried into practice, would
imply the wreckage of civilization, science, legisla-
tion and art, and everything that makes life
possible and worth while. This is what Dr. Klausner
says :

96 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

" Beyond this ethical teaching Jesus gave
nothing to his nation. He cared not for
reforming the world or civilization; therefore
to adopt the teaching of Jesus is to remove
oneself from the whole sphere of ordered national
and human existence from law, learning and
civics . . . from life within the State, and
from wealth in virtually all its forms. How
could Judaism accede to such an ethical ideal ?
that Judaism to which the monastic ideal
had ever been foreign ! . . . Therefore he left
the course of ordinary life untouched wicked,
cruel, pagan ; and his exalted ethical ideal was
relegated to a book or, at most, became a
possession of monastics and recluses who lived
far apart from the paths of ordinary life." 2

The second and (according to Dr. Klausner) much
the most decisive point in the teaching of Jesus
which led the people of Israel to reject Him, was His
failure to show Himself a true nationalist. In the
previous lecture we saw that this nationalist motif
figured in Jewish comment on Jesus nearly a
hundred years ago in the work of Joseph Salvador ;
we saw it more prominently in Joseph Jacob's
romance, As Others saw Him. But with Dr.
Klausner the nationalist motif has assumed such
enormous proportions as to dominate the writer's
entire outlook on our Lord, on His every act and
word.

We are accustomed to think of " nationalism " as
a phase in international politics of comparatively
recent growth. But Dr. Klausner throughout

THE PRESENT TIME 97

thinks and writes, and measures and weighs, and
praises and condemns, as though the rank and file of
Jewry in the time of our Lord had precisely the same
nationalist ideals and fears which move the most
enthusiastic and fanatical nationalists of to-day.
To Dr. Klausner (and he reads the same ideas into
the minds of the Jews of the first century) the
paramount criterion of our Lord's acceptableness by
the Jews was His attitude towards Jewish nationalist
ambitions, towards what counted in Jewish national-
ism, what constituted its essential characteristics,
and what made for its survival. Thus Dr. Klausner
writes :

" The Judaism of that time, however, had no
other aim than to save the tiny nation, the
guardian of great ideals, from sinking into the
broad sea of heathen culture, and enable it,
slowly and gradually, to realize the moral
teaching of the Prophets in civil life and in the
present world of the Jewish state and nation.
. . . Judaism is not only religion and it is not
only ethics : it is the sum-total of all the needs
of the nation placed on .a religious basis. It is a
national world-outlook with an ethico-religious
basis. . . . Judaism is a national life, a life
which the national religion and human ethical
principles (the ultimate object of every religion)
embrace without engulfing. Jesus came and
thrust aside all the requirements of the national
life ; and it was not that he set them apart and
relegated them to their separate sphere in the
life of the nation : he ignored them completely ;

98 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

in their stead he set up nothing but an ethical-
religious system, bound up with his conception
of the Godhead. In the selfsame moment he
both annulled Judaism as the life-force of the
Jewish nation and also the nation itself as a
nation. For a religion which possesses only a
certain conception of God and a morality
acceptable to all mankind does not belong to
any special nation, and consciously or uncon-
sciously breaks down the barriers of nationality.
This inevitably brought it to pass that his
people, Israel, rejected him." 3

In his final chapter Dr. Klausner attempts to
explain what, to his mind, Jesus stands for to the
Jews of the present time. The Jews, he says,
cannot regard Jesus as God, nor Son of God in the
Trinitarian sense ; nor can they regard Him as the
Messiah, nor yet as a prophet. " But," to quote
the writer, " for the Jewish nation Jesus is a great
teacher of morality and an artist in parable. He is
the moralist for whom, in the religious life, morality
counts as everything. Indeed, as a consequence
of this extremist standpoint his ethical code has
become simply an ideal for the isolated few, a
Zukunfts-Musik, an ideal for the ' Days of the
Messiah/ when an ' end ' shall have been made of
this ' old world/ this present social order. It is no
ethical code for the nations and the social order of
to-day." *

" But," he goes on to say, " in his ethical code
there is a sublimity, a distinctiveness and originality
in form unparalleled in any other Hebrew ethical

THE PRESENT TIME 99

code ; neither is there any parallel to the remarkable
art of his parables. The shrewdness and sharpness
of his proverbs and his forceful epigrams serve, in an
exceptional degree, to make ethical ideas a popular
possession. If ever the day should come and this
ethical code" be stripped of its wrappings of miracles
and mysticism, the Book of the Ethics of Jesus will
be one of the choicest treasures in the literature of
Israel for all time." 5

Before touching on the nature of the reception
which the book called forth from the Jewish world,
I should like to touch on the rather difficult question :
" What, if anything, does the book add to the Jewish
attitude towards our Lord ? "

If you put this question to the ordinary educated
Palestinian Jew, in nineteen cases out of every
twenty you will get the answer : En bo shum hiddush
" There's nothing whatever new in it." And such
a remark is largely true in the sense they have in
mind, namely, that all the many streams of thought
and the possible explanations of this difficulty and
that, and the various standpoints adopted towards
this or that phase of the life, Person, character and
teaching of our Lord all of these which are con-
tained in Dr. Klausner's book may be found com-
plete in detail, or sketched, in outline, or vaguely
hinted at in a multitude of writers who have pre-
ceded him. In that sense the author has done no
more than refurbish the conclusions of modern
Gentile critical study of the Gospels and supplement
this with the results so far secured by Jewish studies
in and around the subject. Again, Dr. Klausner's
estimate of the character and teaching of Jesus does

ioo THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

not (except, of course, in closeness and intimacy
and minuteness of treatment) advance much, if at all,
beyond the conclusions of such writers as Salvador,
Geiger or Graetz; it falls far, very far short of
the appreciativeness expressed by certain Jewish
Liberals, like Mr. Montefiore. It is not in the
novelty of its ideas that the significance of the book
lies : even the nationalistic motif which strikes most
Christian readers as so odd even this follows a
beaten track in the Jewish attitude towards Jesus.

The significance really lies in this and Jews have
been the most prompt in pointing out the fact that
it has been deemed suitable by one of whose ardent,
passionate, enthusiastic, even fanatical Judaism,
of whose thorough and complete Jewishness there
can be no two opinions such a one has thought fit
to devote intense labour and care to the writing of a
book devoted solely to the times, life and teaching
of Jesus the Jew. A writer with a most responsible
position in the world of Jewish thought, even a
leading figure in the concentrated, intensified atmo-
sphere of the very centre of that world of Jewish
thought, in Palestine such a man has thought it
worth the trouble, and even his duty, as a Hebrew
of the Hebrews, to write [in Hebrew for the benefit
of his fellow-Hebrews, a weighty, learned treatise,
calling forth his best powers ; and all for what ? to
present to fellow-Hebrews the figure of Jesus, a Jew
who taught Jewish religious ideas and moral princi-
ples to the Jews of Palestine early in the first century.

In the spring of 1926 extraordinary excitement
and interest were shown by the Jews in Palestine in
the performance of a Hebrew play called Ha-Dibbuk.

THE PRESENT TIME 101

That play treats of a condition of Jewish life in
Eastern Europe known as Hasidism. This Hasidism
the enlightened, educated Jews of the West have,
for a hundred years, tried to forget, to ignore, and
condemn as humbug, silly superstition, debased
mysticism, crude charlatanism. But this same
Hasidism has now become a subject of immense
fascination to the nationalist Jews of to-day. They
regard it as one of the spiritual creations of Jewry,
a possession of their race to be treasured and studied.

In much the same way, this book by Dr. Klausner
is symptomatic of a desire in certain sections of
Jewry to collect, treasure and study this nineteen-
hundred-year-old phenomenon which arose from
among the Jews of old the Person and teaching of
Jesus, and to claim Him as a figure in the gallery of
Jewish worthies. It is not and Christians should
not deceive themselves on the subject-^-it is not at
all of the nature of a Jewish approach to Christianity :
the Christ of Christian dogma and the institutional-
ism of the Christian Church with its hierarchy and
ecclesiastical machinery the Jew is as much repelled
by these as ever he was ; to him they are symbols
of bitterest cruelty, savage, senseless and fanatical
persecution and wholesale murder. No, it is not a
sign of Jewish approach to Christianity ; but it is an
attempt to rescue from the hands of Christendom
a figure whom the Jews can claim to be, historically
and humanly, their own.

It is a most unexpected by-product of the rise of
the Jewish nationalist instinct and the revival of
Jewish culture.

This book, Jesus of Nazareth, appeared, in Hebrew,

102 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

from an apostle of Hebrew culture, thought and
learning, and from the centre of the newly revived
Hebrew life in Palestine. One American Jewish
paper hailed it as the first scientific work published
in Hebrew literature ; and an English Jewish paper
(but with a distinct touch of bitterness) made the
comment : " Dr. Klausner and his book are of the
first-fruits of the new Yishub " (the Hebrew settle-
ment in Palestine). 6 So long as the book remained
in its original Hebrew dress, its effect was only felt
in those Jewish circles for whom Hebrew counted as
something real namely, among educated, more or
less orthodox Jews in Eastern Europe, among
professional Jewish scholars, and, first and foremost,
among those, in Palestine and outside of it, who were
affected by the modern revival of Hebrew life. The
reactions were, on the whole, what might have been
expected.

From certain orthodox circles there came nothing
but a significant silence. From another direction
came a substantial volume, couched in a tone of most
lurid vituperation of the new book and scurrilous
abuse of its author, reminding one somewhat of the
seventeenth-century political pamphlets. What
most disturbed this critic was that a leading Jew
should bolster up the superstition that there ever
was such a person as Jesus. I am, however, warned
that it is unfair to Jews generally to refer to this
criticism as emanating from a representative or even
a responsible Jewish source.

A more weighty criticism came at an early stage
from Dr. Aaron Kaminka, a scholar and orthodox
Jew. He writes as follows :

THE PRESENT TIME 103

" Primarily we must protest in the name of
our faith and our clear conscience against this
presentation of the legendary figure of the
founder of the Christian faith as the central
figure in the events of the time of the spreading
of the New Testament, and against exalting
' that man ' on high, and the respect paid to
him as a lofty ethical personality truly fitted
for the propounding of a new Torah, and to be
a ' light to the Gentiles ' implying explicitly
or implicitly that our fathers were smitten with
blindness in that they failed to perceive this
holy phenomenon and the Messiahship of ' that
man.' This idea underlies the very title of
the book and penetrates, like a scarlet thread,
the entire order of events and legends and
hypotheses and investigations. The whole order
of the book, and the prevailing spirit in it, are
a truckling and kow-towing to the Christian
religion and an assertion of great affection for
the foggy figure of its founder, a denial of the
healthy sense of our saintly forefathers, those
enthusiastic Hebrews devoted heart and soul
to the service of the One God, Creator of heaven
and earth, who rejected with loathing those
fables and inventions, knowing the hero of
those stories to have been no more than a
' mocker at the words of the Wise/ ' a seducer
and beguiler,' a hater of the people of Israel,
and one who sought the nation's destruction." 7

Here, we readily perceive, speaks that Jewish
mind which can only look at the figure of our Lord

104 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

through the acrid, red fog of Jewish sufferings at the
hands of Christianity.

But by Jewish scholars on the whole, and by most
elements in Jewry interested in the Hebrew revival,
the book was accepted as a great and important
addition to Hebrew literature and to Jewish history.
But mixed with this reception was a sense of awed
surprise at the dangerous temerity of the author
to dare to treat such a forbidden subject and to
handle it with such utter disregard of the dominant
Jewish prejudice. These fears, as it turned out, were
not unjustified. Startled prejudices were aroused,
and pressure applied in certain high places, with
results which I need not specify, since they have not
altogether been permanent.

More curious, however, was a charge (in an
American Zionist organ) against the author of showing
a lack of tact, as regards the Christian world a charge
illustrating the ever-present dread in some Jewish
minds of "What will the Gentiles say? " While
describing the book as profound and scholarly, this
same critic regards it as a premature venture. The
criticism winds up with the words : " The time is
not yet ripe : as long as the adherents of Christ
do not accept the teachings of Jesus, the Jews must
be silent."

When the book was published in an English
translation it was made accessible to an infinitely
wider circle of readers, Jewish and Gentile. Naturally
its novelty to most English-speaking Jews was not
always apparent at first sight. Books by Jews on
Jesus had been published before, occasionally in
England and very often in America, by authors who

THE PRESENT TIME 105

belonged either to a more advanced Reform Judaism
in America, or to the Jewish Liberals on both sides
of the Atlantic. Many things said by Dr. Klausner
had also been said by them. The great difference,
of course, is that while their sentiments had arisen
from the midst of a civilized Christian environment,
and were always redolent of tact, in view of their
mostly Christian circle of readers, Dr. Klausner, on
the other hand, speaks from an environment exclu-
sively and intensively Jewish.

From the side of Liberal Judaism the most
distinctive comment has come from Mr. Montefiore.
He devotes to the book a long, seven-column review
in the Jewish Guardian* I propose to quote from
it at considerable length, mainly because of the
passages which Mr. Montefiore himself picks out
from Dr. Klausner as being most characteristic.
It is, as we should expect, the nationalism in the book
which most intrigues the reviewer.

He quotes the following :

" A religion which possesses only a certain
conception of God and a morality acceptable
to all mankind does not belong to any special
nation, and, consciously or unconsciously, breaks
down the barriers of nationality."

Mr. Montefiore's comment is :

" Some of us have no longer any place for a
national religion, whether it be Judaism or any
other. For us a national religion belongs to the
museum of antiquities or to the lumber-room.

But to our author, religion must be the
H

io6 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

handmaid of the nation, or, at any rate (since
what other nations choose to have or do is their
affair) for the Jews, at any rate, their religion
must be strictly national ! The nation and the
national life, as always, first and last !

" One can understand " (proceeds Mr. Monte-
fiore) " how all this sort of thing has arisen in
Dr. Klausner's mind. One can well imagine,
too, how in a Russian Jew's soul, born in 1874,
there should be bitterness and occasional
unfairness to Christianity. It is thus that we
can account for an occasional strange outburst,
such as : ' Jesus left the course of ordinary life
untouched wicked, cruel, pagan; his exalted
ethical idea was relegated to a book, or, at
most, became a possession of monastics and
recluses who lived far apart from the paths of
ordinary life.' Or " (continues Mr. Montefiore)
" such an amazing paradox and exaggeration
as : ' Such has been the case with Christianity
from the time of Constantine till the present
day : the religion has stood for what is highest
ethically and ideally, while the political and
social life has remained at the other extreme of
barbarism and paganism/ And " (Mr. Monte-
fiore goes on to say) " the iron in our author's
soul, his passionate nationalism, his admiration
for the Zealots, and his old Jewish prejudices,
are all embodied in the following amazing
sentence : ' Christian morality was embodied
in daily life by ... Judaism; it is Judaism
and Judaism only which has never produced
murderers and pogrom-mongers, whereas indul-

THE PRESENT TIME 107

gence and forgiveness have become the prime
feature in its being, with the result that the
Jews have been made moral (not in theory but
in living fact) to the verge of abject flaccidity.'

" I will not " (proceeds Mr. Montefiore)
" comment upon this sentence ; it speaks for
itself; what is deeply interesting is that, in
spite of this iron in the soul, in spite of his
prejudices (which, for example, as regards
monasticism and asceticism, so completely
prevent him appreciating their services and
value in the history of European civilization)
in spite of this, Dr. Klausner is yet so open-eyed
and so fair. We have seen how, from his
nationalist point of view, he dislikes and con-
demns the negative and polemical attitude of
Jesus towards the ceremonial law (which to
Dr. Klausner is synonymous with a specifically
Jewish national culture) and yet such is his
fairness and open-eyedness, that he constantly
points out how this attitude (of Jesus) was up
to a measure justified by the facts. He (Dr.
Klausner) virtually allows that a prophet who
should do as Jesus did was justified and
desirable.

" Nevertheless " (Mr. Montefiore goes on to
say) " his (Dr. Klausner's) passionate national-
ism warps his judgment and causes him to make
such very odd statements as the following, in
which we clearly see how religion, in our
author's mind, occupies a subordinate place.
He has sought to show that, in Rabbinic
Judaism, religion had become more democratic

io8 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

and more nationalistic, and how there were
mixed up with religion elements of science,
jurisprudence, medicine and general culture,
which caused religion, in Dr. Klausner's words,
' to escape the danger of exclusiveness and one-
sidedness.' And then he (Dr. Klausner) goes
on to say : ' What did Jesus do ? Had he
come and said, Instead of religion alone, I give
you here science and art as national possessions
independent of religion; instead of Scripture
commentaries, I give you learning and poetry,
also independent of religion; instead of cere-
monial laws, grown so oppressive as to crush
the warmer religious feelings, instead of those I
give you a practical and theoretical secular
culture, national and humanistic; had Jesus
come with such a Gospel, his name would have
endured as a blessing among his nation. But
he did not come and enlarge his nation's know-
ledge and art and culture, but to abolish even
such culture as it possessed, bound up with
religion, a culture which the Scribes and
Pharisees . . . seized upon and held tightly, as
though it were the single anchor of safety left
to the nation a nation not minded to be only
a religious community, but a real nation,
possessed of a land, a state and authority in
every sense.'

" It would take too long " (concludes Mr.
Montefiore) " to discuss this curious passage
in which our author's nationalist and secular
attitude towards both Judaism and Jesus are
very apparent. It would need a long pamphlet

THE PRESENT TIME 109

to disentangle the odd mixture of truth and
falsehood, of just appreciations and inaccurate
and irrelevant estimates, in his picture of the
character and teaching of Jesus. . . , Mean-
while, the interest of the book remains the
same, however much one may differ from its
point of view. The author's learning is great.
His measure of objectivity, in spite of all
deductions, is, in the circumstances, most
commendable and remarkable. . . . No such
Jewish life of Jesus has ever been published
before. It is written from a point of view
which, to most of us Westerners, is totally novel
and unexpected. So, for every reason, his
book is one which all of us, orthodox or liberal,
Jew or Christian, would do well to read."

Another English Jewish paper, of by no means
Liberal tendencies, The Jewish World? gave an
article in unstinted praise of Dr. Klausner's work.
The writer points out, and welcomes, the great
change which, he alleges, has come about within the
last twenty years in the attitude towards Jesus of
the younger generation of Jews in Eastern Europe.
Very curiously he dates the change from what he
calls " the pogrom year of 1906." As a result of
these pogroms, he writes, " a religious revival swept
the Eastern ghetto. Their hopes for freedom
shattered, their expectation for redemption gone,
they turned towards God. In those years the
younger generation of Jewish writers and poets in
Eastern Europe discovered the figure of Jesus, and
since those days Jesus has been with them a topic

no THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

of discussion. ' ' This, I should remind you, is written
by a Jew.

The same writer hails Dr. Klausner's work as " a
book of the first magnitude ... for the first time
in nineteen hundred years a rabbinical Jew discusses
the life of Jesus without prejudice, and instead of
continuing the old Jewish tradition, makes an end
of it, and goes a step further by representing the
Founder of Christianity as the embodiment of
religious and ethical idealism. He does not propose
that the Jews should accept Jesus as Christ, but he
does propose that they should accept him as a great
ethical personality. The revolutionary character
of this proposal can only be understood and appre-
ciated when one realizes that it was made in Jeru-
salem by the foremost orthodox Jewish scholar of our
time after that innumerable Jewish generations
had come and gone without pronouncing the name
of Jesus."

In America, immediately before Christmas,
1925, attention was directed to the book in more
sensational fashion. Dr. Stephen Wise is an
American Liberal Jew of somewhat similar outlook
to Mr. Montefiore. Before a large Jewish audience,
three thousand in number, he referred to Dr.
Klausner's book with approval. " He thanked
God such a book could be written, published and
read. ... It marks " (Dr. Wise is reported to have
said) " it marks the first chapter in a new literature.
Such a book could never have been written a few
years ago . You all know what would have happened
to the Jew who would have dared to express his
opinion, based on facts, of Jesus a score of years ago.

THE PRESENT TIME in

Thank God the time has come when men are allowed
to be frank, sincere and truthful in their beliefs.
This book, overlooked by the Press and handled
wretchedly by reviewers, who have missed the point
completely, is the greatest book of its kind ever
published. . . .

" The very foundations of morality," said Dr.
Wise in this same speech, " are contained in the
unparalleled code of ethics which comprises the
teachings of Jesus. . . . Because Christendom has
renounced Jesus in fact, shall we continue to deny
him now that we, his brother Jews, are free to face
his life and teaching anew ? Shall we not say that
this Jew is soul of our soul, and that the soul of his
teaching is Jewish and nothing but Jewish? The
teaching of Jesus the Jew is a phase of the spirit
which led the Jew Godward."

The result of this statement by Dr. Wise was that
the American Press seized the opportunity for a
sensation, indulged in a characteristic orgy of head-
lines, and Dr. Stephen Wise and Dr. Klausner
found themselves the centre of a newspaper storm.
Dr. Wise was bitterly attacked by orthodox Jewry.
Though there was much of inter- Jewish party
politics underlying the attacks, there was still
playing its part a very great deal of the old leaven of
orthodox Jewish abhorrence towards any Jew who
dared to turn his thoughts towards Christianity and
its Founder. Dr. Wise's quite ordinary reference
to the ideals of Christianity were sufficient to make
certain types of Jew accuse him of trying to pervert
Jews from the faith of their fathers.

Dr. Wise's reply is very much to the point for the

H2 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

subject of these lectures. " Who," he says, " who
save in folly or with malice, will charge me with
urging my people to forswear their faith and life
by embracing Christianity? or accepting Jesus?
But a question remains to be answered. Because of
Christian dogma or unchristian injustice to the Jew,
shall the Jew never feel free objectively to face and
revaluate, as Klausner does, the teaching of a
Galilaean Jew of the first century ? What a mournful
commentary upon the infinite hurt which the Jew
has suffered at the hands of Christendom ! that a
Jewish teacher cannot even at this time speak of
Jesus, his completely Jewish background and his
ethical contribution to his time and for all time,
without being hailed as a convert to Christianity, or
misunderstood by some of his fellow- Jews, to whom
the centuries have, alas, made the Christian name
synonymous with injustice and wrong? . . . Shall
Jews for ever refuse to claim Jesus either because of
the centuries of misunderstanding and Christlessness
which have grown out of the stories touching the
manner of his death, or because Christendom is not
yet become Christian? ... I do not need to be a
Christian in order to recognize the place of Jesus in
the great Jewish tradition. Israel gave Jesus the
man and the Jew to humankind. For the most part,
Christendom has denied him in deed, though
amrming him in name. Is not the hour come for
us, his fellow- Jews, to place Jesus exactly where he
belongs this radiant Jewish teacher of Palestine
of the first century ? " 10

I will give only two more quotations in this
connection. The first extract, quoted from an

THE PRESENT TIME 113

American Yiddish paper, 11 gives the general tone
assumed in American orthodox circles : " Does not
Dr. Wise know how much of our blood has been shed
for the God whom he now wants to adopt ? Does
not Dr. Wise know that the ' soul of our soul '
has kept us in burning tongs since the time when
this ' soul ' was invented ? Instead of reading
the English clergyman's translation of Dr. Klausner's
book, would it not be advisable that Dr. Wise should
look through the Jewish History again ? "

The second quotation is from an English Jewish
newspaper : 12 " For a Jew to preach in any form
to Jews on Jesus is an abomination, it is ' death '
or betrayal of the soul . . . the very name of the
world-historic phenomenon, such as is the figure of
Jesus, ought to fill the heart of every true Jew with
trepidation. Is it not for nigh upon twenty centuries
that the blood of innocent thousands of Jewish men,
women and children has been, and still is, spilt for
Christ's sake ? "

So, then, we find that even the Christian civiliz-
ation of America and England is still not enough to
cover up the Jew's memory of pain and injustice in
his nation's past ! 13

It is painfully simple to sum up this course of
lectures.

Nineteen hundred years of Christian dealings with
Jews have brought it to pass that Christians, the
sworn soldiers and servants of Jesus, despite cen-
turies of real Christian endeavour, in spite of the
saintly lives lived by countless hosts of holy and
humble men of heart, apostles, saints and martyrs

ii4 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

despite all these, Christians as such have not been,
and still are not, in Jewish eyes, the true torch-
bearers of Jesus of Nazareth. " Ye are the light of
the world " ; that is our Lord's commission to us,
His disciples. Have we failed ? Not entirely. The
light of Christianity has shone in the darkest places
of the earth, and still is shining throughout the
greater part of the civilized world. It is the Jews
alone who, all through our history, have stood aloof,
watched that light and rejected that light or, it
would perhaps be more true to say, have rejected
those who were the bearers of that light.

The reason is plain : the Christian, wherever he
was confronted by the Jew, has straightway cast
away his Christian torch, rejected his Lord's com-
mission, arrogated to himself the right of vengeance
where our Lord Himself forgave. The Christian
Church, wherever and whenever the power lay in its
hands, has shown to the Jewish race only the
darkened, blackened wall of vengeance, of hatred,
malice and all uncharitableness, acts unblessed by
our Lord ; it has not shown them the bright light of
Christian charity.

Are we to blame the Jews if they have failed to see
Christ in His Church, and now, at last, go groping
to find Him in their own way, using for their guide
any will-o'-the-wisp of a passing fashion of thought ?
Are we to blame the Jews if they turn with horror
from the one possible guide, when all that they know
of that guide, which is the Christian Church when
all they know of it is that for them it has spelled
oppression, persecution and murder throughout the
weary passage of centuries ?

NOTES

LECTURE I

1 OntheSadducees,seeG. H. Box, "Who were the Sadducees?"
Expositor, January, 1918; J. Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth (London,
1925), pp. 216-22, and the references there given.

z See R. T. Herford, Pharisaism (London, 1912) ; The Pharisees
(London, 1924).

3 See Klausner, op. cit., pp. 206-12.

4 See K. Kohler, Jewish Encyclopedia, " Zealots," XII. 639 ff. ;
in " Memorial Volume to A. A. Harkavy," German section,
pp. 6-18 (Petersburg, 1909), " Wer waxen die Zeloten oder
Kannaim? "; Klausner, op. cit., pp. 203-6.

5 Gittin 566-57<z.

6 This nephew, called " Kalonymos " or " Kalonikos " in the
Talmud, is probably Flavius Clemens, nephew of Domitian, put
to death as an atheist in A.D. 96.

7 t. Yebamoth, III. 3 ; Yoma 666.

8 Aboda Zara i6bi?a; t. Hullin, II. 24.

10 Berachoth, i2.

11 Matt. xix. 1 8.

12 j. Berachoth, V. 3.

13 Berachoth, 286.

14 j. Berachoth, V. 3.

15 R. Shimeon ben Gamaliel, Aboth I.

16 j. Pea, L; Sanhedrin, I.; t. Sanhedrin, XII.

17 Megillah (j. and b.) end.

18 Shabbath, n6.

19 Antiquities, XX. ix. i. On the " Jewishness " .of the
Epistle of James, see Joseph Halevy Revue Simitique, XXII.
(1914), pp. 197-201.

20 So H. Graetz, History of the Jews (English translation), II.
374-

LECTURE II

1 For the variants in this " Twelfth Blessing " in the Amidah,
see J.Q.R. (New Series) XVI. 156 f. ; J.E. XL 280 f.
z Hesronoth ha-Sha's (Cracow, 1895).
3 Cod. Theodos. Tit. XVI. viii.

"5

n6 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

* Cod. Theodos. Tit. XII. viii. 3-4.

5 Socrates, H.E. II. 33, VII. 13; Sozomen, H.E. III. 17.

6 Cod. Theodos., XVI. 22.

7 Cf. Socrates, H.E. VII. 16.

8 H. Milman, History of the Jews (edition igog), II. igg.
8 cf. Milman, II. 191, 200.

10 Milman, II. 239.

11 For a full discussion of this material see R. T. Herford,
Christianity in Talmud and Midrash (London, 1905) ; for a more
critical treatment see Klausner, op. cit., pp. 18-47.

12 This summary is taken, with slight modifications, from R. T.
Herford's article, " Christianity in Jewish Literature " in .
Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels, II. 877, where all the
references can be found.

13 Leges Wisi-Gothorum, Lib. XII.

14 Quoted in Milman, op. cit., II. 260.

15 Op. cit., II. 282.

16 The Jew-hunt cry, " Hep ! hep ! " has probably a more
prosaic origin the cry of goat-herds urging on their flocks.

17 On the ToVdoth Yeshu, and for the relevant literature, see
Klausner, op. cit., 47-53. The short abstract here given is taken
from R. T. Herford's article in D.C.G., cited above. Klausner,
op. cit., gives a more detailed summary. Both these summaries
are based on that form of the legend given in Wagenseil's Tela
Ignea SatancB (Altdorf, 1681). Another version, obviously later
in date, is to be found in J. J. Huldreich, Historia Jeschuae
Nazareni (Leyden, 1705). Samuel Krauss, in Das Leben Jesu
nach judischen Quellen (Berlin, 1902), prints three different
complete recensions of the fable together with fragments of
others.

LECTURE III

1 See Davidson, Selected Religious Poems of Solomon Ibn
Gabirol, Philadelphia, 1923, p. xxxii.

2 See his Emunot we De'ot, ii. 5.

3 Cuzari, iv. 23.

* Yad : Melakim, xi, 4.

5 Milman, op. cit., II. 319.

6 In the eleventh century. See Ademar, Hist. iii. 52.

7 Ma'amar ha-Ahdut, iii.

8 See Ludwig Geiger, Johann Reuchlin, Leipzig, 1871 ;
Horowitz, Zuv Biographie und Korrespondenz J. Reuchlins,
Vienna, 1877.

8 See Geiger, op. cit. supra.

10 Sammtliche Werke (Frankfort a.M., 1826-57), xxix. 46-7, 74.

11 xxv. 409, 260.

12 Von den Juden und Ihren Luegen, xxxii. 99 ff .

13 xxxii. 257.

NOTES 117

14 For further details see Graetz, History of the Jews (English
translation), V. 197 fi.; Jewish Encyclopedia, XII. 455 with
Bibliography.

15 Graetz, op. cit. V. 199 ff . ; J.E. V. 80 f .

16 Graetz, op. cit. V. 205 ff.

16a On,the contrary, it is a matter for note, that although the
Christian censorship was never applied in Rotterdam nor, of
course, in Turkey, there is no example of the Jews taking
advantage of such freedom to print anti-Christian writings.

17 Resen Mat' eh, I5b; Lehem ha-Shamayim to Aboth V. 17.

18 Wiinsche in Lessing-Mendelssohn's " Gedenkbuch," pp.
329 ff.

LECTURE IV

1 See Kayserling, Moses Mendelssohn, sein Leben und seine
Werke, Leipzig, 1862.

z See Gabriel Salvador, Joseph Salvador, sa me, ses ceuwes et
ses critiques (Paris, 1881).

3 Das Judenthum und seine Geschichte (2nd ed., 1865), pp.
108-48.

* See especially Sinai et Golgotha, ou les origines du judaisme
et du Christianisme (Paris, 1867). The substance of this volume
was later embodied in his fuller History of the Jews.

*" History of the Jews (English translation), II. 149-50.

46 Drews popularized in Germany the conclusions of Albert
Kalthpff, Die Entstehiing des Chvistentums, 1903. But the
same ideas, arguments and conclusions were put forward more
than a century earlier. See Ch. F. Dupuis, Memoires s^^r I'origine
des constellations et sur I' explication de la fable pay I'astronomie,
1791; the same author's Origine des tous les cultes, ou religion
universelle, 1796.

8 Jewish Quarterly Review, 1894, p. 381.

6 Some Elements of the Religious Teaching of Jesus (London,
1910), p. 88.

7 Ibid., p. 115.

8 Ibid., p. in.

9 Synoptic Gospels (London, 1909), I. civ-cv.

10 The original essay was published in Ha~Shiloach (XXIII.
97-111) in Hebrew, entitled Al Sh'te ha-S'ippim. It is translated
by Mr. Leon Simon in the volume of essays by Ahad ha-Am,
Essays on Zionism and Judaism (London, 1922), pp. 223-53.

LECTURE V

1 English translation, p. n.
z Op. cit., p. 397.
3 Op. cit., p. 390.

* Op. cit., p. 414.

n8 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY

6 Op. cit., p. 414.

6 Jewish Chronicle, January i, 1926.

7 Ha-Toren (New York), May 1922.

8 November 13, 1925.

9 December 30, 1925.

10 For reports of Dr. Stephen Wise's remarks and their results,
see Jewish Daily Bulletin, New York, for December 23, 1925, and
following days.

11 Der Tag, New York, December 25, 1925.

12 Jewish Chronicle, February 26, 1926.

13 The following appeared in Ha-Doar (an American Jewish
weekly paper, published in Hebrew), November igth, 1926,
from the pen of a Hebrew writer of considerable repute :

" It is a proof of feebleness in many of our younger writers
the obvious pleasure they take in using words like ' cruci-
fixion,' ' Golgotha/ and all that class of word, apparently
finding in them some sort of spiritual uplift. And the name
' Jesus ' itself actually incites their pens to creative effort
. . . they love the name. ... I should wonder whether even
among Christians the picture arouses such enthusiasm.

" I have always admired Ahad ha- Am for his dislike of
Christianity for both its content and its form. What a fine
aesthetic sense such dislike shows ! It is utterly incon-
ceivable that Ahad ha-Am should write such a book as that
written by his disciple [Dr. Klausner] : to him the mere
subject matter would be nauseous. Any present-day
Gentile, if he has any spirit left, is bound to loathe the whole
gloomy business; while as for ourselves, it is the starkest
horror !

" We have to shut our eyes tight even against the source of
the matter (innocuous though it may have been originally)
because of the mass of terrible foulness which it has since
accumulated owing to a fatal confusion. ... If any poet
of our day, even a Christian, approaches some creative idea
and takes Jesus as subject in the old-fashioned way, it only
proves his limited outlook and stuffy mentality. Jesus
must never again even cross our minds."

(Italics according to the original.)

INDEX

AHAD-HA-AM (A. Ginzberg) ,

81-85, 9
Annas II, 14

Anti-semiticism, 23, 31, 40, 48
Arian controversy, 27
As Others saw Him, 76, 96

Black Death, 44

Breach, with. Christianity, 15

Christ, attitude to, 3, 8, 15, 18,
34, 68, 70, 72, 74, 76, 78,
79, 87, 94-99, 109-10

Christianity, attitude to, 2-4,
6, 8, 10, 19, 20, 27, 59, 67,
75, 82, 88, 101, in, 114

Christian writings, attitude to,

ii, 13

Constantine, 24
Crusades, 33

Delitzsch, 69
Disraeli, 69
Dominicans, 48, 50

Eisenmenger, J. A., 56
Eliezer the Great, R. 10
Emancipation, 64
Emden, Jacob, 58
Essenes, 7, 16, 75

Fall of Jerusalem, 16, 20
Feudal system, 43

Geiger, A., 71
Gentiles, 5, 15, 19
Gospels, 5, 75, 80, 93
Graetz, H., 73, 89

Ha-Shiloach, 91
Hasidim, 101
Hebrews, Ep. to, 16
Herzl, 81

History of the Jews, 73
Hizzuk Emunah, 58

Ibn Gabirol (Avicebron), 41
Inquisition, 45
Isaac of Troki, 58
Islam, 30, 41

Jacobs, J., 76, 78

James, St., 14

Jesus Christ and His Teaching,

7
Jesus of Nazareth, 89, 92-111

Jewish Encyclopedia, 77
Jews in :

America, 67, 87, 104, no,

France, 32

Germany, 48, 69

Roman Empire, 24

Russia and Eastern Europe,
63, 86, 109

Spain, 31-32, 41, 60

Syria and Palestine, 22, 25,

no

Judah ha-Levi, 42
Judas, 35

Kaminka, Dr. A., 102
Klausner, Dr. J., 89
Kohler, K., 78

Law of Moses, 6, 7, n, 13, 15,
65, 71

119

I2O

Louis, St., 43
Luther, 51-55

INDEX

Ritual murder, 44, 49, 55

Maimonides, 42
Marranos, 45
Mendelssohn, Moses, 64
Minim and Minuth, 8, 11, 12,

20

Mishnah, 22, 58
Montefiore, C., 78, 82, 105

Nathan the Wise, 60
Nationalism, 7, 16, 71, 96, 105

Orthodox Jews, 68, in

Pantera, 28, 34

Paul, St., 5, n, 12, 72

Pauline Epistles, 5

Persia, 27

Pfefferkorn, 48

Pharisees, 7

Protocols of Elders of Zion, 31

Sa'adiah, 42
Sadducees, 7, 9
Salvador, J., 70, 96
Scripture, 13
Sects, Jewish, 7
Shulchan Arukh, 66
Simon Kephas, 36
Surenhuysius, W., 57
Synagogue services, 11-13, 20,
65

Talmud, 9, 10, 20, 21-23, 2 7

32, 48-52, 66, 80, 92
Tarphon, R., 13
Tela ignea Satanes, 56
Toledo, Council of, 31
Tradition of the Elders, 15, 21

Wagenseil, J. C., 56
Wise, Dr. S., no

Yaabetz, Joseph, 46
Reform and Liberal Judaism, Yeshu, History of, 34-37, 46
65-66, 79, 81, 105

Reformation, 47
Reuchlin, 48-52

Zealots, 8
Zionism, 81, 90

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